MURDERED: Alberta O. Jones

On the night of August 4th, 1965, Alberta Jones didn't want to leave the house. She had just become the first Black female prosecutor in Louisville's history, her civil rights work had made her a target, and she'd been followed for months — her sister Flora was once tailed by two men with a police badge who mistook her for Alberta in the distinctive pink Thunderbird. But her friend Gladys Wyckoff called around 11 p.m. insisting a new wig was ready, and Alberta went. She left Gladys's between 1:30 and 2 a.m. in a rented white Ford Fairlane (the Thunderbird was in the shop), and by morning a group of boys found her floating in the Ohio River near the Sherman Minton Bridge. She had been beaten, but she went into the water alive; the cause of death was drowning.

The physical trail never fit a simple robbery. Her shoes turned up on the bridge exit ramp coming into Kentucky from Indiana. The rental car, found two blocks from where a couple reported seeing a screaming woman dragged into a white Ford around 2 a.m., had blood across more than half the back seat, her upper dentures, brick fragments, hair, and fingerprints everywhere — yet the odometer showed 51 miles driven when her known movements account for perhaps 20. Days after the murder, Detective Lancaster discovered the fingerprint cards had been thrown into a lab trash bin after a Sergeant Miller was last seen with them; the prints from the left door window, which Lancaster called possibly the most important of the bunch, were never recovered, and Miller was never questioned. Three years later, boys playing on the bridge found Alberta's purse — ID, check, lipstick, lower dental plate — tucked into a steel brace, its contents suspiciously unweathered for three years in the open.

In 2008 the FBI's automated system matched a surviving print to Arthur Porter III, who was 17 and living in Louisville in 1965; his father owned the funeral home that received Alberta's body, and his hangout, Elliott Park, sat between the convenience store where Alberta was last seen and the street where her car was dumped. Porter denied everything, failed a polygraph at the highest level of deception the report allowed, and was never charged — the Commonwealth attorney refused because no one could say where on the car the prints had been lifted. He died in 2024 maintaining his innocence. The hosts land somewhere darker than robbery: Gladys's story shifted over the years, the wig Alberta supposedly wore home was never found on her body, in the car, or in the purse, and Alberta controlled a trust holding 15 percent of Muhammad Ali's winnings that she had refused to release to the Nation of Islam. Bellarmine University professor Lee Remington, writing a book on the case, considers that money trail the most promising direction.