MURDERED: Alberta O. Jones

Alberta O. Jones was breaking barriers in Louisville, Kentucky. She was the first Black woman prosecutor in the city’s history, she helped register some 6,000 Black citizens to vote, and she was a leader in the city’s civil rights movement. But on Aug. 5, 1965 – before she could make even more changes in the highly segregated city – Alberta was found dead floating in the Ohio River. The night before, she reluctantly went out late to visit a close friend, setting off a 60-year mystery that has led to more questions than answers.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ashley Flowers?

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• 2:17Ashley Flowers?

  Hi, crime junkies. I'm your host, Ashley Flowers.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And I'm Brett.

• 2:20Ashley Flowers?

  You guys, there's a story out of Louisville, Kentucky, that I bet you've never heard of, about a woman that you've probably never heard of. But I don't know why, because it's one of the most mysterious cases I've ever come across. A call, in the middle of the night, lures a woman out of her home, and hours later, her body is found floating in a nearby river. The list of suspects is a mile long, and evidence keeps showing up all over town, sometimes in suspiciously planted ways. Yet, for 60 years, this case has remained unsolved. Our investigation set out to ask the question, "Why?" And the possibilities will surprise you.

• 3:04Ashley Flowers?

  Maybe it's because evidence in the case mysteriously disappeared. It could be because some investigators on this case had ulterior motives. Or it could be because the very foundation that this story was built on might be a lie. This is the story of a woman you should know about. A passionate attorney who made strides at the height of the civil rights movement. A woman who was brutally murdered before she could break even more barriers. This is the story of Alberta O. Jones.

• 4:08Ashley Flowers?

  Alberta Jones didn't want to go out that Wednesday night on August 4th, 1965. The truth is, things had gotten dangerous for her recently. She'd taken a new job, and she'd been doing civil rights work that put a target on her back. So she was being more cautious than she had ever been before. That's why when her friend Gladys Wykoff first called at around 11:00 PM and asked her to come over, Alberta said no. But Gladys pushed. She was a hairstylist too, and she practically begged Alberta to come over that night because the new wig that Alberta wanted was ready for her.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Okay, so get it any other time.

• 4:44Ashley Flowers?

  Well, and maybe the real reason it had to be right then was that she wanted to chat about some legal trouble that she was in. Because you see, Alberta is a lawyer. That new job that she had just gotten was as a prosecutor.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Oh, so good friend to have.

• 4:57Ashley Flowers?

  Free legal advice, right. So this is when Gladys laid it on really thick, like gave her a bit of a guilt trip. She's telling Alberta like, oh, well, you've gotten snobby since getting that new job. And that must have done it because Alberta was at Gladys's house by 11:30 PM. Now, according to Gladys, they hang out at her salon that's in her house until about 12:15, when they decide to go grab a bite to eat at this local seafood restaurant called Kingfish. And then on the way back to Gladys's, they pick up the local newspaper, the Louisville Defender, because there was this article in it that like one of Gladys's employees was featured in. She was calling out racist double standards in the hairstyling industry.

• 5:37Ashley Flowers?

  So, once they got back, Gladys trimmed Alberta's wig, fitted it on her before Alberta left between 1:30 and 2:00 AM. And Gladys said that she watched Alberta get into her car, and then Gladys herself went back inside to go to bed. Now, it wasn't until the next morning that Alberta's sister Flora and her mom Sadie realized that she hadn't made it home the night before. Like, they all lived together, and Flora and Sadie knew something was wrong pretty quickly. Like, they knew about Alberta's fears, knew that she went out last night anyway, and if she was gonna stay out, she would have called. So they phoned Gladys's house, looking for Alberta, but Gladys's daughter answered and told them that Alberta wasn't there. By the way, her car wasn't out front.

• 6:22Ashley Flowers?

  And even when she looked down the street to the parking lot of Alberta's law office, she didn't see her car there either. Now, what her family didn't know was that by the time they were making these calls, and by the time they were even beginning to worry, it was already too late. That same morning, a group of boys walking along the Ohio River, south of the Sherman Mitten Bridge, had found Alberta, floating face down 15 feet from the shore.

• 6:52Ashley Flowers?

  A coroner later found lacerations on her head and her face and scrapes on her right arm and leg. But the trauma is not what killed her. They determined that after being beaten, Alberta was put into the river alive and she actually died of drowning. Sometime, they say, between 2:30 in the morning and 4:30 in the morning.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  So pretty shortly after Gladys saw her leave.

• 7:17Ashley Flowers?

  Yes. Now, when she was found, she was still in the striped dress that she wore out that night. But her shoes and her purse were missing, along with the dentures that she regularly wore. And most glaringly of all, her car is still nowhere to be found. But over the next few days, missing items and clues begin to surface that painted a picture of Alberta's final hours. First were her shoes. Now, the police didn't get a call about the shoes until Friday. That's the day after Alberta was pulled from the river. But it turns out they had actually been found an hour before Alberta's body was.

• 7:57Ashley Flowers?

  A man who worked at a golf course located just under the Sherman Mitten Bridge on the bank of the Ohio River said that he found them kind of like scattered about, maybe like 10 feet apart, just a few feet from the exit ramp coming off the bridge. And police thought that it looked like maybe the shoes could have been tossed from the bridge itself. Now luckily, this guy at the course kept them, like he did with anything valuable that he found. So he was able to turn them over to police. But there wasn't much notable about them, no like blood or anything like that.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And how far were the shoes from where her body was found?

• 8:32Ashley Flowers?

  Not a huge distance. So like from this hand drawn map in the case file, it looks like maybe her body was found about a city block down river. Which is interesting because it was theorized early on that maybe Alberta was thrown from the bridge into the water. So maybe her and her shoes were like tossed over at the same time and like she landed in the water, maybe her shoes didn't. But if she's in the water, she gets carried downstream. And the Ohio River here separates Indiana from Kentucky. And like, I'm sure you know this, but for people who don't, the bridge actually has two levels. So the top level goes from Kentucky to Indiana and the bottom level is from Indiana to Kentucky.

• 9:13Ashley Flowers?

  So the exit ramp where her shoes were found, that is the ramp if you were coming in to Kentucky.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  From Indiana.

• 9:20Ashley Flowers?

  Right. Alberta went missing from Louisville, Kentucky. Right. So if those were thrown from the bridge or from a moving vehicle, it was somebody who left and then came back into that state. Now, it's possible that someone went onto the bridge from Kentucky to Indiana. Maybe they dumped Alberta over on that side. She would have floated down river. All the same as even if she was thrown from the other side. And then maybe as they're driving back, they realize like, oh my gosh, we still have her shoes. Like, let's get rid of them. But I think that's unlikely because of two critical points. Number one, authorities consulted someone on the current of the river. And they said that if Alberta would have gone in whatever side of the bridge,

• 10:03Ashley Flowers?

  they would have expected her to end up on the Indiana side of the river. She was found on the Kentucky side. Meaning someone had to have put her in the water, likely from the shore on the Kentucky side. So number two is even more bothersome. Who had her shoes and why were they on the off ramp like going into Kentucky from Indiana? Like, forget the directions for just a second and let's just like focus on the shoes themselves. To me, getting rid of them implies that there was a reason you didn't want to leave them in the car. If this was her car that they were in, like, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense

• 10:45Ashley Flowers?

  based on what police end up finding in her car when that surfaces a day later. So that happens on Friday, August 6th. This turned out to be a huge curve ball because everyone had been looking for Alberta's car. It was this distinctive pink thunderbird.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 11:03Ashley Flowers?

  Hard to miss.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:04Ashley Flowers?

  Turns out though, Alberta wasn't driving her own car that night. She was in a rental. Her. Thunderbird was in the shop. So that very evening of the fourth, this is the day that she would eventually go to Gladys's that night. That very night, she picked up a white Ford Fairlane.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  So she would have driven that to Gladys's. Why didn't Gladys tell anyone? Like, she would have seen it when she left, right?

• 11:31Ashley Flowers?

  We don't know for sure if Gladys did or didn't say anything. Like, I'm piecing this together from old reports. It seems like the first time everyone realizes that she's in this rental is the day that her body is found. But if Gladys didn't say anything, I mean, honestly, it could have just been because she assumed the family already knew. Like, she drove from her house to Gladys's. So like,

• 11:55Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:55Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know. Anyways, once they knew it was a white Ford that they were looking for, police jumped on a rapport of a similar abandoned car that came in that Friday night. And it was Alberta's All Right, parked on a residential street just a little over two miles from where she was found. And what was inside let police know that Alberta's final moments were brutal. There were blood spots all over the car, but clearly Alberta was in the back when she was bleeding because there was blood over more than half of the backseat. Now, police found her upper dentures on the backseat floorboard along with a ripped piece of the newspaper that she had picked up that morning with Gladys.

• 12:40Ashley Flowers?

  It looked like the killer had actually wiped their bloody hands on it. There were also small pieces of red brick back there, some with blood on it. And there were fingerprints all over the car, inside and out, along with pieces of short and long hair that were inside, too.

• 12:59Speaker 01

  I mean, this feels like a goldmine of evidence.

• 13:02Ashley Flowers?

  Exactly. Which is why it is so puzzling to me that someone would take the time to ditch her shoes. She was clearly in the car, leave them in the car.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Like you did her upper denture.

• 13:16Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know what it means, but it stands out to me.

• 13:19Speaker 01

  And her purse was still missing?

• 13:21Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, her purse wasn't anywhere in the car. And her lower denture plate is still missing, too. Though, I mean, like, that could have been knocked out somewhere along the way or maybe even at the bottom of the river, for all they know at that point. Shoes or no shoes, with what is in the car alone, that could solve a case if it were present day. But in the mid 60s, all police could do was hone in on those fingerprints and the hair samples and compare them to people who pop up in the investigation. And most of their investigation was pointing to the idea of some kind of robbery gone wrong, right?

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, but where would the robbers have crossed paths with her? Like Gladys saw her get into her car to go home.

• 14:04Ashley Flowers?

  Yes, but it turns out that she didn't head straight home. She made at least one stop at a convenience store a few blocks from Gladys's house. Apparently, she was a regular there, and according to her sister Flora, who we spoke to for this episode, Alberta stopped there that night for a soda. And an employee said that he saw her talking to three teenagers. Now, he said nothing looked threatening, so he didn't think much of it. It's not like he's focusing. He goes back to whatever he was doing before. But then when he looks up again, Alberta and the teens are gone.

• 14:36Speaker 01

  And were they in a car or on foot?

• 14:39Ashley Flowers?

  They're on, the teens are on foot.

• 14:40Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 14:41Ashley Flowers?

  Now, those teenagers have never been identified. And if the account is accurate, it might not even be relevant, right? But if Alberta wasn't grabbed outside of Gladys's or outside of her own home, then to me, this has to be the point at which someone made contact with her. And putting these together with what we know about where her car was found and other tips that come in, this theory, at least to me, makes a lot of sense. Because when you look at a map, there is almost this like trail leading west from Gladys's house to the spot in the river where Alberta is ultimately found. Like, one street over from Gladys's place is the convenience store that she stops at sometime around 2:00 a.m.

• 15:25Ashley Flowers?

  Another street over from that, police get a concerning call from a couple who said they'd been woken up to screams at around like 2:00 or 2:15 in the morning. And they say when they went to their front door to see what was going on, they saw a man dragging a woman from the middle of the street up to what they described- A white or light colored Ford where there was at least one other man waiting inside. And when that man pulled the woman close enough to the car, the other one like reached out, pulled her inside. And then the guy outside the car grabbed what looked like either a purse? Or they said maybe a brick from the middle of the street before jumping into the car. Now unfortunately, this couple couldn't make out much about the men.

• 16:07Ashley Flowers?

  But they said that the car sped off west through a viaduct that heads towards the river and the bridge.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  I mean, this has to be Alberta.

• 16:15Ashley Flowers?

  I think so too. Especially because this location where the couple saw this disturbance. This is only two blocks away from where Alberta's car ended up being found. Like again, you just go a couple of blocks even farther west. There's the car, go farther west, there's the bridge. But if this was Alberta, then where they went in the car is a big mystery. Because from Gladys's house to the bridge is only about four miles. From the bridge to where the car is found, that's about three. Round trip, you're talking seven or eight miles. Add a few miles to account for Alberta picking up the car. She picked that up at like 6:00 PM that day.

• 16:58Ashley Flowers?

  She picks it up, drives it home, she drives to Gladys's the same night. They take that car to Kingfish back like, fine. All told, say she did 15 to 20 miles if you want to be like really generous. Interestingly, when police compare the odometer to the mileage log. When Alberta picked up the car, it said that 51 miles had been driven. So where did the car go and when?

• 17:23Speaker 01

  And do we have any sense for when the car got dumped where they eventually found it?

• 17:28Ashley Flowers?

  We do. So even though the car wasn't reported until Friday, the sixth. Witnesses reported seeing the car at that same spot as early as Thursday morning. So we have somebody who puts it there the fifth at like 6:00 AM at the latest. And police docs say that it hadn't been moved after that. So really that gives us like a 12 hour window from when she picks up the car on the fourth at 6:00 PM. To when it's abandoned on the fifth at 6:00 AM. In that 12-hour window, 51 miles had to have been driven. And we know she's last seen alive at around 2:00 a.m. I really don't think she drove all those miles. Like I said, unless there is a part of her night that's unaccounted for, I'm looking at like a high end of 20 for her up until she's seen at 2:00 a.m.

• 18:13Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah. Where else did the car go to put on the additional 20-plus miles? Somewhere in Indiana, maybe? That would explain all the weird bridge stuff. But the thing is, like, all that's happening seems to be happening in this concentrated part of downtown Louisville. So it's no surprise that police really focused in on that area between where the couple heard screaming and where her car was found. And there was actually this pair of brothers that they latch on to, one of whom was rumored to rob people by jumping into their cars and beating them. Apparently, a tip gets called in to police that led them to these brothers in the first place.

• 18:57Ashley Flowers?

  Someone told investigators that one of the brothers was seen driving Alberta's rental car. And I think the police, like, got blinded by this because in their mind, like, all the pieces fit almost too well. Right area, right MO, her purse is still gone, right? Has to be it. And when police got the brothers hooked up to a polygraph, they end up failing. And so they're even more sure that they're on the right trail. But what it took to get the failed polygraph, not on the up and up. The brothers denied having anything to do with Alberta's death, and one of them said that they failed because they took the polygraph after being beaten and interrogated. He said that he was driving a white car around the time Alberta died,

• 19:40Ashley Flowers?

  but it wasn't Alberta's rental, which police confirmed to be true. And when they compare these brothers' prints to all of the prints from Alberta's rental, neither of theirs match any of them. And when the tipster who offered them up in the first place ends up getting like really scrutinized, it came to light that they only gave these brothers names with some like weird scheme in mind about police helping a relative of theirs like get out of some legal trouble like it was like all nonsense.

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Like some sort of like quid pro quo for the tip?

• 20:14Ashley Flowers?

  I guess. It's very confusing logic, but it meant that any evidence of the brothers being involved fell apart and then police had no choice but to rule them out. Problem was there was no one else to rule in. A look at those closest to Alberta hadn't revealed a suspect. I mean, her boyfriend is ruled out. They had a good relationship, so there was like no motive. His prints didn't match the ones found in the Ford, and he was home with his mother in the early morning hours that Alberta was killed. Police also looked into people Alberta prosecuted or who were unsatisfied clients, thinking maybe someone held some kind of grudge against her. But that didn't lead anywhere either. So the

• 20:54Ashley Flowers?

  theory that seemed the most plausible at the time was that this was a robbery gone wrong. Someone must have just spotted Alberta, pegged her as an easy target to take whatever money she had on her in her purse. And, you know, it's always hard to solve a stranger attack like that, but maybe one day the prints on her car would turn up a match. Or maybe they would find her missing purse. The truth was, both things would end up happening. But when they did, it didn't confirm their theories. It actually completely threw them on their head and introduced possibilities of conspiracy and cover up.

• 21:39Ashley Flowers?

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• 25:02Ashley Flowers?

  Three years passed after Alberta's murder without an arrest or really any new updates. But then, on July 16, 1968, a group of boys playing on the lower level of the Sherman-Minton Bridge found something that changed this entire case. When they leaned over the ledge, they saw this black leather purse tucked into this, like, hole on one of the steel braces. And it wasn't even hard to get to or to grab, so they did. And inside was a check, key rings, lipstick, a lower dental plate, and the ID for Alberta O. Jones.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Did they not search the bridge three years ago?

• 25:49Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know how well they did or didn't search the bridge, but I don't think that matters because I actually don't think the purse had been there for three years.

• 25:59Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 26:00Ashley Flowers?

  But where it was, it's not like in this enclosed area. Or anything. It's like right out there in the open, exposed to rain, to snow, every other flavor of unpredictable Midwest weather that you can think of. And this thing, the contents in it, like, it did not seem weather worn. Which makes me think someone put it there. Someone wanted it to be found.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Was it by where her shoes were tossed off the bridge or where they like think they were tossed?

• 26:29Ashley Flowers?

  So that's the thing too. Both are placed or thrown from the lower level. You know that. The one that goes from Indiana to Kentucky. But the purse is placed closer to the Indiana side.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  Like the beginning of the bridge?

• 26:41Ashley Flowers?

  Like when you're getting on and then the shoes were tossed on, like as you're getting off on the Kentucky side.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  So if it was placed, like, why now?

• 26:50Ashley Flowers?

  That's the question I can't answer. Like I said, there weren't many developments in this case. And honestly, it wasn't even like major news anymore. So it's not like they were close to arresting someone or like, you know, someone's trying to like lead them somewhere. So yeah, why now? Was someone feeling guilty? Was this a clue? Was it possible that someone was trying to subtly tell people that they needed to look back at the bridge for answers? Because there was actually a clue early on that involved the bridge in this case. A witness who saw something very strange that seemingly just got overlooked. Or maybe tossed aside as insignificant. But I have a hunch of why that was.

• 27:36Ashley Flowers?

  So you see, within a week of Alberta's murder, Louisville Police had set up roadblocks on both the Kentucky and Indiana on-ramps of the bridge. And they were stopping motorists, asking if anyone had seen anything suspicious the night of Alberta's murder. They talked to like 222 motorists in total. And one of them, a guy named Peter Baker, said that he actually was on the bridge that morning. He worked super early because Mr. Baker worked at a bakery. So he was in his truck on the bridge with a coworker at like 4:35 a.m. And he says that he saw a white car stopped at the center of the bridge. And his coworker, Robert Bostock, remembered it too, though he remembered it being a little closer to the exit ramp into Kentucky.

• 28:21Ashley Flowers?

  Either way, they both remembered that the white car wasn't alone out there. Pulled up behind it was a marked Louisville police car. Now, they didn't see anyone outside of the cars. And remember, it's estimated that Alberta went into the river between 2:30 and 4:30. So this was like just outside of that window.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Okay, by five minutes, though.

• 28:47Ashley Flowers?

  I know. But there were two other people that they found who say that they were on the bridge that morning too, from like 4 to 4:30, and they say that they didn't see any cars. So it seems to be concluded that Alberta was already in the river at that point. And if this was her car, she wasn't in it.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  Okay, well, who's that officer who was stopped on the bridge? Like, what do they have to say?

• 29:08Ashley Flowers?

  No one ever cops to it being them, if it's real, right?

• 29:12Speaker 01

  I mean, then they have something to hide.

• 29:14Ashley Flowers?

  But what? Now, the timing is interesting to me because if she went into the river before the car was on the bridge, then why did they go into Indiana in the first place?

• 29:27Speaker 01

  And why did they stop on the way back?

• 29:29Ashley Flowers?

  Right. Like, throw the shoes anywhere. Like, surely there was a more inconspicuous way to get rid of them.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Throw them in Indiana.

• 29:37Ashley Flowers?

  Exactly.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  And like, two cars wouldn't necessarily need to stop, like, for that, right?

• 29:43Ashley Flowers?

  Right, right, right. It's not like you can say like, oh, the white car was like pulled over and a police officer just like stopped to see what was going on because like it looked suspicious or whatever. Because like, A, again, why isn't that officer come forward and be like, I actually pulled someone over on the bridge? B, if the officer stopped and had no idea of the situation, like, they would have like seen the bloody backseat and that would have been cause for concern.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:06Ashley Flowers?

  Because if Alberta is already dead, that backseat is covered in blood. If that was Alberta's car and if there was a Louisville police car stopped behind- That morning, the only way this makes sense is if whoever was in the police car knows what happened.

• 30:20Speaker 01

  Or was involved in what happened.

• 30:23Ashley Flowers?

  And the more you dig into this angle, the more you'll realize that there is something that really stinks here. Going all the way back to the beginning, like this car tip that was dismissed. Early in the investigation, so before police spoke to Gladys or anyone in Alberta's family, there was this senior Louisville police officer who seemed to know like more than he should. So the missing person report that her family put in, it didn't name Gladys and it didn't have any details about Alberta's movements with Gladys that night. Yet, this guy somehow knows about Gladys, knows that Gladys called Alberta to come over,

• 31:07Ashley Flowers?

  knows that they went out to eat before he had ever spoken to Gladys or anyone in Alberta's family.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  How?

• 31:14Ashley Flowers?

  Nobody ever really explains this or even seems to think it's like as weird as Alberta's family does.

• 31:20Speaker 01

  I mean, I do.

• 31:21Ashley Flowers?

  Same, but it's just like glossed over.

• 31:23Speaker 01

  So he's either involved or talking to the people who are involved.

• 31:28Ashley Flowers?

  Or option C, someone was following Alberta that night, whether they were involved or not. And that is not a far-fetched idea because people had been following Alberta in the time leading up to her death. So remember, I told you that she had been scared recently because of her work. Well, there's a lot that went into that. Alberta had just become the first black female prosecutor in Louisville history. Remember, this is 1965, so I'm sure some people weren't too happy about that. And even before that job, Alberta was heavily involved in the city's civil rights movement. She was breaking barrier after barrier, and she was one of the first black students who

• 32:12Ashley Flowers?

  attended the University of Louisville, and she was considered the first black woman to pass the Kentucky bar exam. And importantly, she was passionate about registering black citizens. to vote. So she co-founded the Independent Voters Association and helped register roughly 6,000 black voters in Louisville. And she was a major part of the group that helped oust Louisville's mayor in 1961 and establish new laws against racial discrimination. She had such a great reputation that Muhammad Ali relied on her to negotiate his first professional contract.

• 32:46Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 32:47Ashley Flowers?

  But all of that made her a target. Alberta's family noticed that Alberta was becoming paranoid in the months leading up to her death. And I honestly hate that word because like paranoid makes it almost sound like this was like a all in her head or whatever. But like, these were very real things that were happening to her before her death. Alberta told her family about being followed and about people hitting her car, leaving scrapes. It felt really intentional to her. And Flora said she knew for a fact herself that Alberta wasn't just imagining things because one night in May of 1965, this is like three months before Alberta died, Flora was actually driving Alberta's car, her distinctive car.

• 33:29Ashley Flowers?

  And she saw this car following her, like making every turn, every stop. And Flora finally pulled over and confronted this other driver. And she said, in the car were two white men, and they showed her a police badge.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Like Louisville PD?

• 33:45Ashley Flowers?

  That's what she thought. And she said the men just laughed before speeding off. But later, it occurred to Flora, they weren't following her. They were following the pink Thunderbird.

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Alberta's car.

• 33:56Ashley Flowers?

  She was Alberta. Yes. And Flora also remembered one day when Alberta was talking on the phone to one of her friends. And then when they hung up, the phone rang again. And when Alberta picked it up, it was a man's voice on the other end joking about the conversation she had just been having. Like, he heard the entire thing. And so Alberta was convinced that someone had tapped her phone.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  Okay, that feels like way bigger than the LPD.

• 34:20Ashley Flowers?

  I mean, declassified records show that the CIA, along with other US agencies, spied on Martin Luther King Jr. There was a vested government interest in stopping equality movements that Alberta was a part of. And listen, the very night that Alberta went to see Gladys, Alberta was apparently reading about the Kennedy assassination. And Alberta said that very night, she hoped that she wouldn't end up like him.

• 34:47Ashley Flowers?

  After Alberta died, Flora said that the family learned Alberta had just gotten a burglar alarm put on her car, and she had apparently bought a gun.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  Put on the car that was in the shop that one night?

• 35:00Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, and it's not lost on me that so much of this mystery surrounded the bridge connecting Kentucky to Indiana, because Indiana had a resurgence of the KKK in the 1960s. Remember, there's 51 miles on that car. The purse is found on the Indiana side. There seems to be some tie to Indiana. I just don't know what it is.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  Were there any Indiana people that showed up in the case file at all?

• 35:27Ashley Flowers?

  No, not in like a meaningful way, but like, I don't know how much I actually trust the file, because this idea that Alberta could have been targeted, the glaring reality that this, more than anything else, makes the most sense for a motive, it seems to have been like totally ignored. I mean, despite the deceptively large case file, I don't think this case was truly worked. I think a lot of work was done, but it all feels like a distraction. They spent so much time on a robbery, maybe even tried shady tactics early on to get a confession. I mean, there was a point when they accused Alberta of being Gladys's lover, but it was like all nonsense.

• 36:08Ashley Flowers?

  This running around in circles, addressing anything but the elephant in the room. It did, it led to a lot of work being done on this case, but for who? Because it didn't seem like it was for Alberta. Otherwise, why two days after she was found dead, did some of the prints lifted from her car get thrown away?

• 36:32Speaker 01

  What?

• 36:33Ashley Flowers?

  Oh, you heard me. And the story of how this even got found out is wild. So it's August 9th, 1965. We're talking days after the murder. And this detective, Detective Lancaster, is working really early hours. He's there at like 4:30 a.m. And he gets this idea about how they can utilize like the most important physical evidence that they have in this case, the fingerprints taken from Alberta's rental car. He's like, you know what? We should be comparing these to everyone, not just people in her life, but like every felon who gets brought in, honestly, even people brought in on lesser charges. Like, this doesn't have to be a part of their record, but we should compare them to these, like, known suspect prints.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Not bad ideas.

• 37:16Ashley Flowers?

  Right. Also, he says, we should get prints from her Thunderbird that was in the shop, see if any of the prints match. Like, maybe she knew the guy before, maybe we can like-

• 37:25Speaker 01

  Or like rule out people from the rental place.

• 37:27Ashley Flowers?

  Precisely. So, crack of dawn, Lancaster pops into the fingerprint lab to talk to the officer who is in charge over there, Officer Elliott. And as far as I know, no one else is in the room when this happened. So I'm just left to imagine the way that the air was sucked out of this room. The look on Officer Elliott's face as he has to tell Detective Lancaster that they don't have all the prints anymore. And then he gives the reason why. He says that on the morning of Saturday, August 7th, he was just finishing up his overnight shift when two people came into the lab, a Sergeant Miller with the department and a technician with the last name Patterson.

• 38:11Ashley Flowers?

  Now Technician Patterson had pulled the print cards from Alberta's case out and was gonna go through them, but Sergeant Miller told him, you know what, just leave the prints alone, I'm gonna go grab coffee and then I wanna look at them. Now Officer Elliott is leaving as Sergeant Miller was going to get coffee. Well, fast forward to that night, Officer Elliott reports back for duty. It's still August 7th, 10 p.m. now, and he goes to pull the prints from Alberta's case. They're actively working this case. Like, now that he is there, Patterson is literally about to go get Alberta's prints so they can rule out whatever prints are hers. Like, that's how fresh this- Is like that hasn't even happened yet. So Elliot goes to the envelope where the print cards are kept and they're empty.

• 38:56Ashley Flowers?

  Like all of them are gone. So Elliot looks at Patterson and he's like, dude, like, where is our evidence? Patterson says he doesn't know. He stopped looking at the prints when Sergeant Miller told him to. He said that Miller was the only one who had gone through them that night. So Elliot starts frantically looking around the lab. I'm sure he's like rifling through drawers, opening cabinets, like preserving prints is their main job. He cannot lose these. And that is when he sees them in a trash bin between desks. Like someone threw these prints away. And because of this, some of them were completely ruined.

• 39:38Ashley Flowers?

  And even more concerning, some of them were still missing. The prints that were taken from the left door window were never recovered. And the magnitude of this cannot be understated because Detective Lancaster said that he was present when these prints were lifted. He knows they existed and he states in his memorandum to Major Robert A. Gregory that those prints were good prints and possibly the most important prints of the bunch. Of course, there were no photos taken of the prints, no negatives. And so all they had left was one slightly smeared print from the left door window. Instead of the actual, really good ones that they know they collected.

• 40:23Ashley Flowers?

  And Detective Lancaster ends his letter to the major saying they need to contact Sergeant Miller and find out what he did with the prints. Or contact the FBI and see if maybe they have them. And what is nuts here is that there is nothing in the file about anyone ever questioning Miller about the prints, about where the prints are or why he may have thrown them in the trash. Instead, he continued working the case and handling evidence even after those prints got thrown away. That wouldn't be the only time in this case that evidence was destroyed.

• 41:02Ashley Flowers?

  No one knows exactly when this next thing happened because no one caught it like Lancaster did the prints. Or if they did, a memorandum about what happened didn't survive in the file. But in 1988, investigators decided to take another look at Alberta's case. They still weren't looking at the possibility that Alberta was targeted because of her civil rights work. They weren't trying to figure out if she was being followed or who was tapping her phone. And they weren't taking a good, hard look at their own department to see if the case was mismanaged. Instead, they were interested to know if Alberta's case could be connected to another woman's death. Her name was Decorah White, and she'd also been found dead in the river a year before Alberta.

• 41:45Ashley Flowers?

  Except, no autopsy was even done on her. And they just assumed that she fell in the river and drowned. So the theory went that maybe Alberta was doing some legal estate work for Decorah, but Alberta's family basically shut that down. She's like, not only was Alberta not working with Decorah, they didn't even know each other personally. And long story short, police ended up saying that they couldn't connect the cases because none of the people in Decorah's case matched the prints in Alberta's.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  You mean the prints that were smudged and missing?

• 42:14Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, so I wouldn't be using that as an excuse to write a theory off, which is probably why they went looking to see if they could link other evidence to Decorah's case. But here, in 1988, is when they find out, oh, guess what? Almost all of it's gone. Photos, we know the fingerprints are gone. The blood samples, gone. Police had sent some of it off for testing, some, I guess, went to the FBI. But detectives were calling around, and they just could not track this stuff down. Obviously, that 1988 investigation didn't get anywhere. And knowing that evidence was now mostly gone, destroyed, missing, whatever, it's not like there was much to go back and test over the years, like we see with so many other cold cases.

• 42:57Ashley Flowers?

  All they had were a couple of okay fingerprint cards. But Officer Elliott saving those cards from the trash would turn out to be one of the most important moves in this whole case. Because, more than 40 years after he pulled them out of the bin, thanks to new technology, one of the prints got a match.

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• 46:42Ashley Flowers?

  By 2008, the FBI had an automated system to quickly match even low-quality prints against a national database electronically. And when cold case investigators in Louisville asked the FBI to run prints in Alberta's case again, after more than four decades, they finally got some good news. One of the prints hit on a match, and it belonged to a man in California named Arthur Porter III. But Arthur wasn't a California native. Back in 1965, when he would have been just 17 years old, he was living in Louisville, Kentucky. His father owned a prominent black-owned funeral home, the same one that Alberta's body went to. The Louisville detective now working Alberta's case wasted

• 47:27Ashley Flowers?

  no time getting on a flight out to LA. I mean, this was the biggest, best lead his department ever had, and whatever was done by his department before, he was charged with solving it now, and he wanted to talk to Arthur, who is now 61. And it's kind of a strange interview, because when he sits down with him, Arthur insists that he had nothing to do with what happened to Alberta Jones, while at the same time, like, seeming to kind of have a little more knowledge about the situation than I would expect if he was, like, really in the dark or hadn't thought about this woman in 40 years. Now, to be fair, when Detective Terry Jones starts this recording, he introduced himself as a homicide detective with the Louisville Police Department.

• 48:10Ashley Flowers?

  So when Arthur is insisting that he doesn't even know why he's being talked to, but then in the same breath says he didn't kill anybody, he could very well be like putting the pieces together, making an assumption. Why else would a homicide detective fly across the country to meet with you unless it was about a homicide?

• 48:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:26Ashley Flowers?

  When Detective Jones finally tells him what homicide he's investigating, Arthur says that he remembers Alberta even after 40 years. Now, he never met her personally, didn't hang in the same circle, like, why would he? I mean, he reminds the detective more than once that he was barely out of high school then and had no business hanging around a career woman like Alberta. Before he knows how his name was even brought up in this case, he comments to the detective, "I've never been with her." And then the detective asks a cleverly worded question. "Did you work anywhere that summer that she was killed that might have put you in contact with her?" And Arthur says, "No, he worked at his dad's funeral home." So the detective pushes again, "Okay, so like, no car lots?

• 49:10Ashley Flowers?

  Like, you didn't detail cars, like pumping gas, anything like that?" And he says no to all of this. And in doing the questioning this way, basically Detective Jones is backing him in to like a firm stance that there is no reasonable explanation for his prints to be on or in Alberta's rental car. But he never mentions prints. He asks if any of his jobs would have put him in contact with her, specifically her. And the answer is no. So the next question the detective asks is, "So, leading up to her death, what did you know about her?" And this is where the answer is a little odd to me. Arthur said all he knows is that she got killed and she was a lawyer.

• 49:50Ashley Flowers?

  And if they found his prints, he doesn't know what they were doing with her because he was a good kid. A bookworm, straight out of school, who didn't get into any trouble. And Detective Jones doesn't miss a beat. He's like, "You said prints, like, why are you talking about prints?" And to be fair, Arthur, like, he doesn't say it like this, but he's like, "Listen, I'm not dumb, you're clearly..." Asking me if there's any reason for me to have like touched a car, right? Like he's putting the pieces together. But once the cat is out of the bag, the interview goes on and on, round and round. Arthur, at least in text, sounds pretty convincing to me, or reads pretty convincingly to me, as he tells detectives that he had no idea how his prints ended up on her car.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Where on her car?

• 50:33Ashley Flowers?

  Well, so this is the catch. We don't actually know all these years later. So in the interview, Detective Jones tells Arthur they were in Alberta's vehicle. But actually, in the documents we have, police aren't ever able to determine exactly what part of the car the prints are from. Like, they could be from the inside, sure, but it's been so long and the original case notes don't say. So investigators in 2008 don't actually know for certain. Either way, Detective Jones is like, here, let me just show you the reports. And Arthur's like, listen, I don't need to see the reports. I don't care what is written in these reports. I didn't kill this woman.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  But you were in her car?

• 51:08Ashley Flowers?

  Right. And Detective Jones isn't super confrontational as he like pushes back. He's like, listen, this is why I'm here talking to you. I'm trying to figure this out. I'm not even saying all of these prints are yours. In fact, I know they're not all yours, but some are. Help me help you. How could they have gotten there? And Arthur says, okay, well, maybe if the prints are on the hood or something, it got there when him and his buddies were hanging out. So they start spending some time talking about where they used to hang out that summer. And this is where it gets really interesting again. Because Arthur says that they're always on the west side by where his two buddies live, between Hale Avenue and River Park Drive.

• 51:49Ashley Flowers?

  Mostly, they would hang out at Elliot Park, which is really interesting when you look at the map again. Just to the east of the park is the convenience store that Alberta stops at at 2:00 a.m. Just to the west of the park, like right on the corner, is where the couple saw a woman screaming and being pulled into a car. And then one street west of the park is where Alberta's car is ultimately found. Arthur just keeps saying, I was a good kid. I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't hang around with anybody who did. And he's even willing to take a polygraph to prove it. So they're like, perfect. Let's get this on the books for the next day. And they do. And Arthur shows up, as promised, for it, and he fails.

• 52:32Ashley Flowers?

  In fact, the report found, quote, "the highest level of deception possible."

• 52:38Ashley Flowers?

  I think 2008 detectives probably thought they had their man. Or at least they found a man with the answers that they were looking for. But they could not get Arthur to talk after that.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  I mean, does he need to? If they've got his prints?

• 52:56Ashley Flowers?

  Yeah, but like not knowing where the prints are from leaves this door open to a million explanations. So even though they, it seems like, want to charge Arthur with something, the Kentucky Commonwealth attorney refuses. In a letter that they sent to the Louisville Metro Police Department, it says that the state would not prosecute Arthur then or ever because the case wouldn't hold up in court.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Okay, so if Arthur was involved in some way, I guess I have all the questions, like, why? How?

• 53:28Ashley Flowers?

  Well, I thought it was really interesting that Arthur mentioned two friends that he was with a lot that summer. Because I was thinking about that gas station sighting of Alberta. There were-

• 53:39Speaker 01

  Three teens.

• 53:40Ashley Flowers?

  Mm-hmm. What if that was them? Also, come down the rabbit hole with me real quick. There was another run-in that Alberta had with teenagers that night, and I didn't mention it yet. So back when her and Gladys went to Kingfish to grab a bite, Gladys said that two white boys were yelling perverse things at them from their car. They actually drove off because of it. Now, she said that she didn't notice them following the car or anything, but is it possible that those two white boys met up with Arthur later? Remember, we don't know the race or have any descriptions for the three boys from the gas station.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  I was gonna ask.

• 54:19Ashley Flowers?

  But I do suspect that Arthur's two friends were white. Because while their names are redacted from the transcript, what's not redacted is the part where Arthur tells police that his two friends, their dads worked for Louisville PD. One was a sergeant and one was a major. I know at the time that Louisville PD was predominantly white. So that's what I'm basing my assumption off of.

• 54:47Speaker 01

  Well, and is that the real reason the fingerprint cards disappeared?

• 54:52Ashley Flowers?

  Makes you wonder, right? And listen, I went down a rabbit hole of yearbooks and obituaries trying to figure out who these guys could be. I could not pin it down. I will say that the Sergeant Miller, the one who was last with the print cards before some magically went missing. I think I found the right Miller. Based on his obituary, he only had girls, so I don't think that was like him protecting his kid.

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Okay, but someone else's?

• 55:18Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know. Because this 2008 investigation feels a little like the 1965 one. Even though there are a lot of documents and work, the work I want to see is either missing or wasn't done. Because I can't find any records of them going and speaking to the friends that Arthur names to figure out if they know anything or had any connection to Alberta's case. The mention of them just kind of like goes away, just like the prints did. And listen, maybe Arthur's prints are a red herring. We couldn't ask Arthur about it ourselves because he passed away in 2024, maintaining his innocence.

• 55:58Speaker 01

  If it was just like a group of teens, though, Arthur or not, do you think it really was just like some robbery gone wrong?

• 56:06Ashley Flowers?

  So no matter who it was, I really don't think that that was the motive. Because I don't think Alberta just randomly encountered her killer. Like, I actually think that she was set up from the beginning. I mean, think about it, she didn't want to go out. She had been extra cautious lately. It would have been hard to get her in a vulnerable position unless she was lured out of the house. Maybe by someone she trusted.

• 56:37Speaker 01

  Are you saying Gladys was in on it?

• 56:39Ashley Flowers?

  I don't know for sure, but I can tell you that Alberta's family always suspected that. Her sister Flora still suspects that. Because there are some things that just don't add up. Like, for one, over the years, Gladys's story of what happened the night Alberta came over kind of changed. I mean, at first, she said that she watched Alberta get into her car before she went inside, right? But in a later interview, she said that she watched Alberta actually drive away. This isn't like a huge deal. I think it could be easy to misremember some things over years. But what is a huge deal is that in her original story, it was that Alberta came over, she fits the wig, they go to Kingfish, and then they come back and Alberta said that she wanted the wig trimmed up a little bit more.

• 57:24Ashley Flowers?

  She didn't like the way that the bangs fell or something. So they went back into Gladys's house before Alberta left. But in one of the later interviews, Gladys said that Alberta didn't come back inside her house at all after they went to Kingfish that night.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  I mean, that's not like that huge. It's not saying she didn't come over at all, right?

• 57:42Ashley Flowers?

  No, but this highlights the thing that I am obsessed over. Was or wasn't there a wig?

• 57:51Speaker 01

  What do you mean?

• 57:52Ashley Flowers?

  The whole reason Alberta supposedly goes to Gladys's that night is for this wig, right? Like Gladys, sure, she wanted to talk legal stuff too, whatever, whatever, but she wanted Alberta to get this wig. Alberta gets the wig put on. Alberta is supposedly wearing the wig when she leaves. Where's the wig, Britt? Because guess what? Alberta didn't have a wig on when she was pulled from the river. There wasn't a wig in her car or in her purse when that's found years later. And listen, admittedly, I don't know a lot about wearing wigs in general, much less the techniques of applying wigs back in 1965. But I did wear one wig for our Halloween photo shoot, and that baby was glued to my head. So I kept thinking, I doubt her wig wasn't like secured, right? Like, it's not just like sitting.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  She's having her hairdresser fitted on her.

• 58:38Ashley Flowers?

  It didn't just float away in the river. So I did a lot of phoning a friend, talking to women in our office who have worn wigs, including the reporter for this case. Shar Adams and everyone said that the wig would have been secured. Likely not glued though, because it seems that was kind of rare back in 1965. So I think that's important too, because it's not like the water like loosened the glue. Right. It more than likely means that the wig was secured on with pins. So why wasn't the wig on her head when she was found? The autopsy said that Alberta had a cut on her forehead, right near her hairline that looked like she was maybe jabbed with a stick. Other than that, there was nothing out of the ordinary about her hair.

• 59:24Ashley Flowers?

  There wasn't a report of any pins or combs to hold down the wig. So like, I keep coming back to, was there a wig? Gladys did provide a similar wig to police, so they knew what they were looking for. Now, to be clear, Flora said that the family never suspected that Gladys actually committed the murder. But they did know that she was in debt. So they think that someone maybe paid her to get Alberta out of the house that night. And she took the job to help pay off her debts, not thinking that anyone was going to kill Alberta.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  I mean, wouldn't you think she would just say that though? Like if that's what happened?

• 1:00:03Ashley Flowers?

  I think it depends on who's paying you, right? Like, who would you be pointing the finger at? Are they scary people? Are they powerful people? I mean, maybe that's not even what happened. There is actually one theory that the family heard about from a detective that could explain a lot, including the missing wig. In the year after Alberta died, there was supposedly this guy in a Chicago jail who was planning to confess to being involved in Alberta's murder, along with two other people. And the man said that they were in Louisville to rob a bank around the time Alberta died. But then they got this better deal to kill an attorney. And according to Flora, the man said that they killed Alberta and then sold her wig somewhere in Kentucky.

• 1:00:47Ashley Flowers?

  But the detective who told the family about this came back later and said that the guy had been stabbed to death in jail before the detective could even go talk to him personally.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  That seems convenient.

• 1:00:57Ashley Flowers?

  Right, weird timing. And whether or not that story was true or connected, this whole case reeks of something bigger, bigger than just who killed Alberta. The question for her family is who was behind her killing? Who might have helped cover it up? Because it feels like someone in power had a hand in this. And if that's the case, then it likely has to do with one or two places where Alberta was getting in the way for people. Either it had to do with her civil rights work, or it had to do with her work involving Muhammad Ali.

• 1:01:37Ashley Flowers?

  So I told you earlier that Alberta negotiated his first professional contract, but she was also managing a lot of his money, like 15% of all the winnings at the height of his career. It was kept in a trust that he couldn't touch until he was 35. And if someone wanted that money, they had to go through Alberta. Now, this started to get explored a little in the 1980s investigation. A detective reported that Ali wanted some of his money to go to the Nation of Islam, but Alberta refused. And the detective said that they even argued about it, and Ali told Alberta that members of the NOI really wanted that money.

• 1:02:17Ashley Flowers?

  But all lines of inquiry into this stopped when the detective's wife started receiving threats, said that if her husband didn't back off, that they would put her in the river.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  So he just backed off?

• 1:02:29Ashley Flowers?

  Seems like he just backed off, yeah. But this avenue is getting renewed attention now, thanks to a professor at Bellarmine University in Louisville named Lee Remington. She has been studying this case for a book that she's writing about Alberta's life and death. And so far, she says this is the direction that seems most promising. She expects to lay out more evidence, like a potential money trail leading back to Alberta's killer, when she publishes, though there is no published date quite yet.

• 1:03:03Ashley Flowers?

  Like I mentioned, the book is about more than just Alberta's death. Alberta made a huge impact on her community in the 34 years of life that she had. And Flora and Lee have made sure that she won't be lost in history. In 2017, Louisville honored Alberta as a hometown hero and hung a banner with her picture on a massive bank building along a street named after Muhammad Ali. The city named a park after Alberta, and there is an annual Alberta O. Jones Park Day. Alberta's been gone for over 60 years, but it's never too late for justice. So if anyone out there has any information about her death,

• 1:03:43Ashley Flowers?

  you can contact the Louisville Metro Police Department's Cold Case Squad at 502-574-7055, or you can email us directly, [email protected].

• 1:04:11Ashley Flowers?

  You can find all the source material for this episode on our website, crimejunkie.com.

• 1:04:15Speaker 01

  And you can follow us on Instagram at @crimejunkiepodcast.

• 1:04:18Ashley Flowers?

  We'll be back next week with a brand new episode.

• 1:04:59Ashley Flowers?

  Crime Junkie is an AudioChuck production. I think Chuck would approve.

• 1:05:07Speaker 02

  When the nights grow longer, the shadows start to stir. And that can only mean one thing. Full Body Chills is back. This season, step inside original tales where every doorway leads somewhere darker, every stranger carries a secret, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. Each story takes you somewhere new, but be careful. You never know what might follow you home. So gather round, listen close, and stream Full Body Chills wherever you get your podcasts.