55 years after her murder, Alberta Odell Jones looks down on protests demanding justice for Breonna Taylor. But we’re still waiting on justice for her.
Who was Alberta Jones?
Alberta Jones was the type of person that has to be described as impressive.
She graduated at the top of one of the first integrated classes at U of L, and 4th in her class at Howard Law School in Washington D.C. When she took the bar exam in 1959, secretary of the Kentucky State Board of Bar Examiners Vincent Goodlett told her that as far as he knew she was the only Black woman to take the state bar exam and would be Kentucky’s first Black woman attorney if she passed. In an article in the Courier Journal about this historic achievement she said, “If I had known how much was depending on me I would have studied harder- and I would have worn something different” (Courier Journal 9/15/59).
After passing the bar and becoming a lawyer, she is quoted as saying, “A lot of people told me ‘You’ve got two strikes against you, you’re a woman and you’re a Negro.’ Yeah, but I’ve got one strike left, and I’ve seen people get home runs when all they’ve got is one strike” (Courier Journal 3/4/64).
In 1960, she represented the boxer then known as Cassius Clay in negotiating his boxing contracts (Courier Journal 3/9/60, 10/27/60). Even today, it is a rare achievement for a female lawyer in the male-dominated world of sports to represent a high profile client like Muhammad Ali.
She was also a founder of the Independent Voters Association, a controversial group in Louisville that sought to register Black residents as Independents in order to leverage their votes as a block to force politicians to commit to civil rights legislation (Louisville Times 8/30/62). This was back when neither party had really made a play for the Black vote at a national level since Reconstruction, and at the local level both parties were fairly racist in that liberal “at least we’re not the KKK” sort of way.
The IVA was especially active in preparation for the 1961 mayoral and municipal election, where the Democratic mayor and Board of Aldermen had refused to pass an ordinance integrating businesses in Louisville, and the Democratic mayor had actually pledged to veto. The Republican candidates ran on a promise to pass and sign an ordinance into law (“Even I Voted Republican,” Farrington). The following year, Black voters in Kentucky backed a Democrat in the national Senate election at a large margin, in part because he had claimed a civil rights agenda (Courier Journal 11/7/62). The IVA registered at least 6,000 voters and became a political force in their own right, conducting educational seminars on how to use a voting machine for Black residents (Courier Journal 3/4/65).
Alberta opened a trust fund to collect donations for a seven-year-old boy named Bucky Welch after he lost his arms when he tried to save a puppy from under a train at 28th and Wilson. The train started and he lost both arms. She filed a $350,000 damage suit for Bucky in circuit court in August of 1964 which would eventually be settled after her death (Courier Journal 9/1/64).
She had her own legal practice in an office on West Broadway, and on March 1, 1965 she started her job as Kentucky’s first female prosecutor (of any race). According to an article from the Louisville Defender, she was surprised to be offered the position given her political background — as the head of the Independent Voters Association she was a registered Democrat, but voted independently and encouraged others to do the same, voting for “the man, not the party.” She was appointed by a Republican administration to the office of prosecuting attorney of the Louisville Domestic Relations Court, where she would handle cases of domestic violence, among other things. She took the job, but told Isaac Gumer, the Prosecutor who appointed her, “I’m am not promising anything,” as if to say she would not toe the party line or stop her activism because she was being given a job (Louisville Defender 3/4/65).
Just six months after the story about her new position as prosecutor, she would leave home at night to visit a friend and never make it back.
The Murder
Around 11:30 p.m. on the night of August 4, 1965, Alberta Jones received a call from a friend named Gladys Wyckoff. The story was originally reported that Gladys wanted Alberta to come over so that she could be fitted for a wig she had ordered previously. When she left her house on the night she would be murdered, her sister was reading a magazine about the Kennedy Assassination. Alberta made a dark, offhand comment to her sister in the vein of, “I hope I’m never assassinated.” Her sister responded, “Don’t you worry about it, you’re not the President of the United States” (WHAS11 2017).
Alberta went to Gladys’s salon on West Broadway and tried on the wig and then the two drove to a restaurant at 4th and River Road and ordered sandwiches. They returned to Gladys’s home and talked for a while, and Alberta left around 1:30 a.m. still wearing the wig (Courier Journal 8/6/65).
A West End family reported hearing screams and seeing a woman being dragged by a man into the back of a car around 2:15 a.m. on Magazine Street around the 2700 block (Courier Journal 8/8/65).
A note here: this location, where Alberta was last seen alive, is just a couple of blocks away from where David McAtee was shot and killed this summer after LMPD and National Guard decided to enforce a curfew designed to curb protests in the West End where people were gathered not protesting but having a barbeque. This same location is just around the corner from the alleged “trap house” on Elliott Ave. that the city wanted so badly to take possession of that Breonna Taylor ended up dead in the first place. As Stephen King wrote in 11/22/63, “The past harmonizes.”
The next morning around 10:30 a.m. some boys spotted a body in the Ohio River near Fontaine Ferry Park- an amusement park that used to be located near Shawnee Park on the river. The body was fully clothed but shoeless. Around 1:30 p.m. Alberta’s mother called the Louisville Crime Prevention Bureau because her daughter had failed to return from a visit with a friend the night before. Her body was later identified by Daryl Owens, who shared a law office with her. She was only thirty-four years old (Courier Journal 8/6/65).
The Investigation
The car she was driving, a rental, was found parked in the 3100 Block of Del Park Terrace, some ten blocks southeast of the stretch of the Ohio where her body was recovered. There were bloodstains on the rear seat, on the floor of the rear seat, and on the back of the front seat. Her upper denture plate was found on the rear floor of the car. There were also pieces of brick on the rear seat (Courier Journal 8/7/65). There were fingerprints on the steering wheel and particles of brick and other matter. These were sent to the FBI in Washington D.C. for study (Courier Journal 8/8/65).
A pair of shoes were found near the south exit of the Sherman Minton bridge on the Shawnee Park Golf Course that were identified by her mother as belonging to Alberta. This led police to theorize that she was thrown from the bridge after being beaten unconscious. The official cause of death on her autopsy report was listed as drowning (Courier Journal 8/8/65).
At this time, police were publicly discussing the possibility that her death may have been related to her work as a prosecutor, perhaps a defendant who didn’t like the way she had handled a case. There was a theory that she may have been a target of a robbery, but this was dismissed by her family because she did not wear jewelry and did not carry much cash. Her case was also discussed in the context of five other unsolved homicides in the West End that year — all women — and another from the previous October of a woman named Mrs. James D. White who had been found in the Ohio River down near Fort Knox (Courier Journal 8/10/65) (Louisville Defender 8/12/65).
But these more pedestrian theories are not the only ones people have about her death. Alberta had a high profile role as a trustee of Muhammad Ali’s agreement with the Sponsoring Group, which established a trust fund that held a percentage of his winnings until he turned thirty-five, and she could have been a target in this capacity as well. There are some theories that wonder if she may have been killed so that Elijah Muhammad could access Muhammad Ali’s trust fund for the Nation of Islam (New York Times 9/19/17).
And it is worth noting, that Alberta Jones was not universally beloved, and her work in the civil rights arena had earned her the ire of plenty in the city. Her work to register Black voters as Independents was not a strategy that went over well with old guard members of the NAACP who had ingratiated themselves with the political machinations of the city as best as a Black organization could in the 1960s. The organization had been working to deliver votes to the Democratic party, which had won every Mayoral race in the city since 1933, and had more or less had complete control of the city for the past three decades. The Democratic Party had paid lip service to some civil rights causes and made some piecemeal reforms during its time in power, but many thought it had not gone far enough, especially in its blatantly racist refusal to pass an integration ordinance in the face of months of protests in 1960 and 1961 (Courier Journal 2/12/1963). Many believe her death was related in some capacity to her civil rights activism and the work she was doing to force integration and progressive change.
On October 8th, the Independent Voters Association, held a memorial banquet in her honor that included a political forum for the candidates in the upcoming municipal elections. J. Earl Dearing, the Black man who was the Republican Candidate for Police Court Prosecutor (which handled claims for things like loitering and other infractions slapped on people by cops) said that the last three years had seen Black residents of Louisville and Jefferson County making greater strides “than they did under 28 years of Democratic rule. Negroes have been employed in and promoted to jobs and positions that seemed forever barred to them.” All of this because of the policies adopted by the Republican administration (Louisville Defender 10/14/65).
Louisville Safety Director Kenneth Newman also spoke at the dinner, giving a eulogy for Alberta. He told guests at the dinner that night that he was “guardedly optimistic” that her murder would soon be solved. In particular, he said, “In the last few days we have discovered some evidence which leads us to believe we are on the threshold of solving this mystery” (Courier Journal 10/9/65).
In November of that year, her death was officially ruled a homicide by drowning. And that is the last news I can find on the case until almost a year after her murder (Courier Journal 11/18/1965).
In June of 1966, the Courier Journal published a follow-up piece on the case, interviewing Acting Sgt. Roy Myers of the Police Department’s Homicide Squad. He said, “We still get a lead occasionally, in fact, one of our men is checking out a lead now.” At one point, the investigation had focused on two men who had become prime suspects, but there was not enough evidence to convince a grand jury (Courier Journal 6/8/66).
The news is quiet again for a couple of years after this. But then in July of 1968, almost three years after her body was found in the Ohio River, her purse is found “in exceptionally good shape” by some boys climbing on one of the bridge structures of the Sherman Minton who found the purse inside a hole in a girder. The contents of the purse included a wallet without cash, her ID and credit cards, a $200 check made out to herself, a partial dental plate, and several key rings. At this time, Homicide Squad Sgt. Herman H. Mitchell Jr. was interviewed and said, “We have some real good suspects, but we have not been able to develop a case against them. We have laid the groundwork against some of them and when we talked to them three years ago, they didn’t indicate ever touching the purse. So if we could find fingerprints of one of the suspects, it would tend to make a case against him” (Courier Journal 7/18/68).
It is worth noting here that at the time of her death, a large amount of evidence was collected, including fingerprints that were found in the car and sent to the FBI (Courier Journal 8/8/65). There were 30 or more separate items collected in the early days of the investigation (mostly in the car), including a toothpick, a match cover, a floormat, her shoes, her denture plate, and brick fragments (Courier Journal 8/11/65). I’m bringing this up because it will become important later.
The Trail Goes Cold
The case would be mentioned in the Courier Journal only twice in the next decade. Once in 1971 just to say that it had more or less come to a standstill. And once in 1978 to revive the story 10 years after the purse was found. In this article, Gladys Wyckoff’s story about why she called Alberta has changed from the initial reporting. Instead of calling her to try on a wig, she wanted to discuss a controversy over differing standards for Black and white beauticians. The story from there is the same though, if not a little more detailed. They went to a restaurant where they ate shrimp and lemonade in the parking lot, and a car of youths taunted them. And about 2:00 a.m, a couple on Magazine Street said they were awakened by a woman’s screams. When they went outside the screaming stopped, but they saw a man pick something up from the street, get into a car with three other men, and drive away (Courier Journal 2/13/78).
As far as I can tell, she is mentioned in the Courier Journal only one time between 1978 and 2000. A 1980 article about Bucky Welch, the boy who had lost his arms rescuing a puppy, for whom Alberta had set up a trust and filed a lawsuit, mentioned her briefly in this context. When Bucky died in 1993, however, Alberta’s name was not mentioned in the story that ran with his obituary (Courier Journal 9/7/80; 4/1/93).
There is nothing again until a mention of her in a Black History Month blurb in 2009 about her being the first female prosecutor of any race in Louisville and the president of the Independent Voters Association, among other achievements, as well as highlighting her unsolved murder.
The Suspect Who Can’t Be Tried
Then, in May of 2010, seemingly out of nowhere, there is an announcement — police believe they have found a suspect and solved the case, but there will be no trial, “because there is no longer enough evidence to get a conviction.” In an April 23 letter to police, Commonwealth’s attorney Dave Stengel said he would not seek an indictment, “because short of the suspect confessing to the crime, it would be impossible to prosecute the case” (Courier Journal 5/4/10).
Police released the name of the suspect, but the Courier Journal would not name him because he was not charged. At the time of the murder he was seventeen years old. The suspect was found after the FBI ran six fingerprints collected at the time of the murder, on prompting from LMPD’s cold case detective Terry Jones. One of the fingerprints matched a man from Louisville who had since moved to Orange County California (Courier Journal 5/4/10).
In 2008, Detective Jones traveled to California to interview the man. He denied any connection to the murder, but he failed a polygraph test. The Courier Journal article mentions here that the evidence in the case was processed, “but doesn’t exist anymore.” Notes on the evidence, which no longer exists, as well as documented leads, were turned over to the commonwealth’s attorney. According to the letter he sent to police, Stengel said his office would be unable to secure a conviction because
“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” (Courier Journal 5/4/10).
In August 2011, 46 years after her death, County Attorney (not to be confused with the commonwealth’s attorney) Mike O’Connell honored Alberta by hanging a portrait of her in the office’s “Hall of Justice” (Courier Journal 8/11/11).
A Professor Searches for Answers and Hopes for Justice
In the next few years, Jones’ case would be picked up by local professor Dr. Lee Remington, of Bellarmine University. Dr. Remington attended University of Louisville’s Brandeis School of Law, where Alberta Jones portrait is featured on a wall of Kentucky civil rights leaders. Under her portrait it tells about her work for civil rights and the fact that she was murdered. Remington saw the portrait when she was in school, and was shocked that the murder of a prosecutor would still be unsolved after so many years. This story stuck with her through her time in law school and grad school. When she became a professor at Bellarmine in 2013, she began researching Alberta’s life, contacting her sister and becoming immersed in the case (Washington Post 10/9/17).
Remington gained access to the case files from a friend of the family who had made an open records request before she started her research, and what had started out as a project for a biography became a true quest for justice for Alberta Jones. Remington told the Washington Post, “In 10 minutes, I found two major discrepancies. In the records, they said all the detectives who worked on the case were dead, which is not true.” She was able to locate Detective Carl Corder, who had collected evidence in 1965, and “he was very much alive” (Washington Post 10/9/17).
In 2016, Remington sent a letter to LMPD requesting the case be reopened. “The evidence is now missing. Misplaced? Lost? Thrown Away? Destroyed? Where did it go?” Remington asked during her interview with the Post. Sgt. Josh Carr, who works in the Louisville homicide unit, said the case is still active, although if this were the case, the department would not have fulfilled the open records request to the family friend, and they have intentionally left investigations open to avoid releasing information to families of victims for civil rights lawsuits, such as in the case of Shelby Gazaway (Washington Post 10/9/17). Remington was able to get the case sent to the FBI, to be investigated under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act in 2017.
On Monday October 9, 2017 Mayor Greg Fischer dedicated one of the last “Hometown Heroes” banners for Alberta’s Louisville. Dr. Remington and Alberta’s Sister Fiona Shanklin raised $8,000 for the banner and found a home for the banner on the side of River City Bank at 6th and Muhammad Ali. This location represents a dark era in Louisville’s history — the razing of Walnut St. in the 1960s. River City Bank, which is housed in the former Mammoth Life Insurance building is the last remainder of what was once the city’s thriving Black business district. Businesses were forced to move or die completely and nearly everything on Walnut St. (which is now Muhammad Ali) from 6th to 15th was razed in the name of urban renewal and promises that the city would bring in something “bigger and better.” Mammoth Life was the only Black-owned business to survive the purge. Much of Muhammad Ali is now empty parking lots. The “bigger and better” never came, and the community was destroyed.
The Past Harmonizes
Last month, it was announced that none of the cops would be charged in the murder of Breonna Taylor. Officer Brett Hankison was charged with 3 counts of wanton endangerment for firing shots that went into the apartments of Breonna’s white neighbors (he was not charged for shots that went into an apartment of her Black neighbors, per a statement the lawyer for Breonna Taylor’s family, Sam Aguiar, made on Facebook).
Protests have been constant since the release of the 911 call from Kenneth Walker in late May, with over 100 days of protests at Jefferson Square Park at 6th and Jefferson that is now known as Injustice Square Park and Breeway after being occupied by protesters for months. The lack of charges for the officers spurred more residents to take to the streets, not only demanding justice for Breonna, but demanding the abolition of the system that refused her the justice she deserved.
Protesters have been largely peaceful, except for a few incidents, including an incident where someone running with a crowd of protesters shot and hit two cops after the cops threw flash-bangs into the crowd. The shooter was apprehended without incident. Police, as well as the National Guard and Department of Homeland Security agents, who are on the ground in the city, have responded to the mostly peaceful protests with an overwhelming show of force and military suppression tactics aimed at the protesters, including by bringing out a water cannon and discussing plans to forcibly enter a church where protesters had sought shelter.
At some point during the first night of protests, one of the militarized police units rolled down Muhammad Ali Blvd. WFPL reporter Ryan Van Velzer captured a shot of Alberta Jones looking down on a city demanding justice for another Black woman murdered under suspicious circumstances and whose case has also seen evidence suppressed by a corrupt police department. Within days of the charging decision (or lack thereof) in the Breonna Taylor case, Vice News received the PIU (Public Integrity Unit) file from the case and uncovered bodycam footage that both LMPD and Mayor Fischer have said “did not exist,” showing the cops violating numerous policies after the shooting.
Is the evidence from the Alberta Jones case still out there somewhere too?
The FBI is handling the Alberta Jones case under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes Act, and it is investigating LMPD’s handling of the Breonna Taylor case. But the FBI has a history of heinous behavior on civil rights issues (The Assassination of Fred Hampton: How the FBI and the Chicago Police Murdered a Black Panther, Jeffrey Haas) so many have limited faith in the organization to even achieve the most basic retributive justice, let alone to address decades old systems of corrupt plantation politics protecting dirty cops in the name of profit for those in power.
Fifty-five years after Alberta Jones was murdered in Louisville, the city demands justice for another murdered Black woman. Thus far, the system has failed to bring justice or even answers for Alberta Jones for 55 years, and it has failed Breonna Taylor even though we know who killed her — although we still don’t know exactly why Joshua Jaynes lied on the warrant to raid her apartment in the middle of the night, or why the 7-person team that served the warrant didn’t notify SWAT that they were serving another related warrant at the exact same time SWAT was hitting houses across town.
This system was not designed to protect Black women. Breonna Taylor died at the hands of the system itself — cops are the enforcement arm of our justice system after all. And in both cases there appears to be law enforcement intervention to repress or tamper with evidence. If those who are supposed to be held accountable for committing heinous crimes hold positions of power and influence in the system, how do we expect that system to deliver justice to their victims? The system itself is an instrument of corruption. It does not serve Black women. It never has.
