The murder of Alberta Jones has primarily been investigated by the notoriously racist, abusive, and violent Louisville Police Department (LPD), which in 2003 became the Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) when the city and county merged into the Louisville Metro. LMPD drew international scrutiny in 2020 after a violent gang of armed thugs broke into the home of a Black woman in the middle of the night, likely with the intention of robbing her, and fired dozens of bullets into her apartment and those of her neighbors, and then engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the crime and suppress information about it. When these actions sparked protest, other gang members repeatedly brutalized protesters, media, and uninvolved bystanders. The event I am referring to is, of course, the murder of Breonna Taylor, and the gang of thugs is none other than criminally violent and scandal-ridden narcotics unit of LMPD, which was revealed by the brilliant investigators at Vice News to have a pattern of civil asset forfeiture fraud and abuse, essentially committing robbery by falsifying warrants and seizing money and property without even charging subjects with a related crime.
In March of 2023, three years after Breonna Taylor’s murder, the United States Department of Justice released a report documenting a culture of systemic racism, sexual abuse, and violence wherein the department regularly commits civil rights violations, suppresses negative information, and fails to properly investigate, let alone discipline, the most dangerous criminals in the city- the ones with badges and guns and qualified immunity.
This same police department which murdered Breonna Taylor, attempted to cover it up, and then brutalized those protesting their violence and corruption naturally conducted a completely ethical and aboveboard investigation into the 1965 murder of Alberta Jones.
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In 2012 Dr. Lee Remington J.D., Ph. D, and associate professor of political science at Louisville’s Bellarmine University began an academic investigation into the murder of Alberta Jones. She obtained a copy of the police file from a friend of Alberta’s family, who had received a digital copy of the 1,500 pages of police documents and records after the 2008-2010 investigation was closed. Those documents come from three distinct investigations over the last 6 decades. The original 1965 investigation, which petered out after her purse was found in 1968, the 1988-1989 cold case investigation, and the 2008-2010 fingerprint investigation. Dr. Remington’s investigation into the case has been ongoing for the last eleven years, meaning it has lasted longer than the combined duration of all three police investigations, and for most of that time she was conducting her investigation alone before I joined her as a research assistant in 2021.
This article will briefly cover each of the three police investigations as well as Dr. Remington’s academic one.
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The Original 1965 Investigation
From day one there are reports and documents which are conspicuously absent from the police file. Many of these documents are literally from day one of the investigation, including the report from the first officers on the scene who arrived before the homicide detectives whose report is contained in the file, and a report by an officer who aided in identifying Alberta Jones body. This report is mentioned by another officer but is not actually included in the file. There are also portions of several reports which seem to have been intentionally occluded by cutting off relevant information on the tops or bottoms of pages during scanning.
In addition to the reports which are noticeably missing from the file, there are several instances where witnesses changed their stories from one interview to the next, often contradicting themselves as well as other witness accounts. Subjects of interest are mentioned by multiple interviewees but are never investigated themselves. And there is a particularly notable account in a memo written by a fingerprint technician who witnessed an officer attempting to destroy and dispose of prints collected from Alberta’s car, which the technician retrieved from a trash bin. These are just a few of the most glaring issues with the 1965 police file. It is also worth noting that the 1965 investigation never did much to put a substantive motive to her murder, presenting only loose theories about a robbery gone wrong or an angry defendant.
The 1988-1989 Cold Case
The 1988-89 cold case investigation focused on a possible connection between the murder of Alberta Jones and another unsolved murder from the previous year. On October 3, 1964, a Black woman named Decora White disappeared after leaving a friend’s house late at night. Her body was found the next day in the Ohio River, and her car was found a few days later parked a few miles inland from the river. The detectives conducting this cold case investigation honed in on a local organized crime figure who was rumored to have been involved in the murder of Alberta Jones and who had a personal connection and a vendetta against Decora White. Though this man and his underworld connections are mentioned in a few interviews in the 1965 Alberta Jones case file, the possibility that her murder may have been an organized crime hit is avoided entirely in the original investigation despite Louisville’s reputation as an open city for vice and gambling.
Within a year of opening the cold case investigation exploring this angle it was shut down with a memo from a superior officer stating that there is insufficient evidence to support this theory.
The 2008-2010 Fingerprint Investigation
After receiving a call from Alberta’s sister Flora Shanklin in 2008, another LMPD cold case detective picked up the case. Upon reading the file he learned that over 30 pieces of physical evidence were collected during the original investigation, including hairs, cigarettes, and toothpicks that might possibly still yield some DNA, he decided to track down the evidence and see if anything could be done with it. Sometime in the twenty years between the 1988-89 cold case investigation and 2008 the physical evidence had disappeared from the Louisville Police’s property room. Convenient, since DNA analysis had come into prominence over that same twenty years and could have potentially been used to identify the killer or killers. In his search for the missing evidence, he learned that the FBI had retained three latent fingerprints from when LPD had originally sent the items to the bureau for analysis in 1965. He submitted a request to have the prints checked against FBI databases and the search returned a match. However, with the original evidence gone it was impossible to tell where on the car the fingerprint came from- whether it was on the inside or the outside of the car.
The man to whom the fingerprint belonged was a seventeen-year-old kid at the time of the murder. The cold case detective contacted him and set up an interview, which he conducted with another detective. During the interview the fingerprint match told the detectives that he had absolutely nothing to do with the murder, that he was a good, smart kid who was about to leave for college just a couple of weeks after the murder happened. The detectives asked him how his fingerprint could possibly have ended up on the car used to abduct Alberta Jones. While discussing the case, detectives mentioned that the locations where she was reportedly seen screaming and escaping from her abductors and where her car was found were on the streets bordering Elliott Park, where teenagers often hung out and played sports. The man told the officers that he used to hang out at that park with his friends. He asked officers if the print was found on the outside of the car, but they avoided answering since they did not know the original location where the print was taken from.
After this interview the man agreed to take a polygraph exam. The recording detective reported that he “exhibited deception” but with no elaboration as to what questions prompted this response. And of course, the polygraph results are absent from the file.
When the existence of the fingerprint match was brought to the attention of the Commonwealth’s attorney, he declined to bring a case, stating that “most of the material witnesses, as well as the original investigators, are dead; a polygraph test is not admissible in court; no blood samples from the scene remain for DNA testing; none of the evidence can be found in the property room; and it cannot be determined where the fingerprint was taken in the car.” However, at least one of the original investigating officers was still alive at the time, as were several witnesses. And it is worth noting that people have been convicted and even executed on far flimsier circumstantial evidence.
But I am not advocating for legal action against the fingerprint match, and after reading his interview I do not believe he was responsible for her murder. It is quite likely that his print was on the outside of the car. If he and his friends hung out in the area where the car was found, then it is plausible that he may have simply touched the car while walking down the street. If he and his friends were at the park at the time she was abducted I think it could have even been the case that they may have heard Alberta screaming and attempted to intervene before being scared off by the assailants. After all, the location where she was reported to have been seen escaping from the car or being forced into it was at least a couple of blocks away from where she most likely would have been abducted on her way home. Even if he did play some sort of role in her death, a seventeen-year-old kid was not the mastermind of a high-profile murder that has remained unsolved for over half a century.
2012-Present Academic Investigation
Dr. Lee Remington is the associate professor of political science at Bellarmine University. She first learned about Alberta Jones as a young law student at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, where she noticed Alberta’s portrait on a wall of Kentucky civil rights leaders. Alberta stood out as the only woman, and Lee, another woman in the male-dominated legal field, stopped to examine the plaque under her photo, which listed some of her achievements before stating that she was murdered and the case remained unsolved. Lee was shocked that she had lived in the Louisville area for her entire life and had never heard of Alberta Jones.
Alberta’s story stuck with her through her time in law school and and graduate school. When she became a professor at Bellarmine in 2012 she began researching Alberta’s life and became immersed in the case. Early on she developed a friendship with Alberta’s sister Flora and gained access to the case file from a friend of the family who had made an open records request after the case was closed in 2010.
Lee has devoted her life to this research for the last decade, determined to find justice and honor Alberta Jones. During this time she has experienced odd attempts to observe, interfere with, and stifle her investigation- including multiple instances of hacking, as well as cyber-stalking and thinly-veiled threats from masked or spoofed phone numbers. But to quote a pathetic old white man from Kentucky who felt his fragile masculinity was being threatened by a woman who spoke out against white supremacy, “Nevertheless, she persisted.”
After her first four years of researching the case, Lee submitted a letter to LMPD requesting the case be reopened and began a public campaign to bring attention to the life and death of Alberta Jones. Lee and Flora raised funds to have Alberta honored with a “Hometown Heroes” banner in 2017. That same year Lee gave interviews to national newspapers about her research on the case. Shortly after the case gained national attention the FBI opened an investigation under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act, though no information from this investigation has been released.
I joined Dr. Remington’s investigation in 2021 as a research assistant helping her sift through documents and examine things with a fresh set of eyes. I created this website in hopes of bringing more attention to the case and providing a hub where people can learn about Alberta’s life and death.