KY KY - Alberta Jones, 34, homicide, Louisville, 5 Aug 1965

Fifty-one years after Louisville’s first female prosecutor was beaten unconscious and thrown into the Ohio River to drown, a Bellarmine University professor who has researched a book about civil rights trailblazer Alberta Jones is asking Louisville Metro Police to reopen the investigation of her murder.

Jones, who helped integrate the University of Louisville and was the first black woman to pass the Kentucky bar exam, was killed on Aug. 5, 1965, and no one has ever been charged with the crime.

In 2008, the FBI matched a fingerprint found inside her car with a man who was 17 at the time of the murder, but then-Commonwealth’s Attorney Dave Stengel concluded two years later that short of a suspect confessing to the crime, it would be infeasible to prosecute the case.

Stengel cited the loss of evidence and the death of key witnesses.

But in a seven-page letter to be presented Wednesday to Chief Steve Conrad, Lee Remington Williams, an assistant professor of political science who also is an attorney, says that some key witnesses, including a lead detective and the last person to see Jones alive, are “very much alive.”

She also cites leads that were not fully explored after the fingerprint match eight years ago.

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On Aug. 5, 1965, Alberta Jones was attacked and dumped in the Ohio River.

“She was abducted by 3 to 4 people,” described the 34-year-old's sister, Flora Shanklin. “She drowned because they beat her until she was unconscious.”

Fifty-one years later, no one has been charged with Jones' murder.

Shanklin still holds onto newspaper clippings, countless photos and signs of her older sister’s accomplishments.

“She was a black female doing something that nobody’s ever done before,” Shanklin said.

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LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Alberta Jones is the civil rights pioneer almost no one knows. She was Louisville’s first black prosecutor and negotiated the first fight contract for Muhammad Ali, her neighbor. She registered thousands of African-American voters in the 1960s and paved the way for a ban on racial discrimination by local theaters and lunch counters.

One person who was astonished she had never heard of Ms. Jones was a professor named Lee Remington, who began research for a biography four years ago. The more Professor Remington learned, the more she became desperate to discover what no one has ever learned: who was responsible for Ms. Jones’s death in 1965, when, at 34, she was brutally beaten and thrown into the Ohio River to drown.

Poring over 1,600 pages of police files, Professor Remington, a lawyer and political scientist, shifted from mere history to what she calls “a quest for justice.’’ She laid out what she believed were overlooked clues to the murder in a long letter last year to the Louisville police, who agreed to reopen the case. The Justice Department’s civil rights division also stepped in.

But even with renewed interest in the case, it is unclear whether there is any real chance — 52 years after Ms. Jones died, when witnesses are deceased and evidence has vanished — of finding out who killed her and why. “I believe her death was directly related to the work she was doing,” said Professor Remington, who teaches at Bellarmine University in Louisville. “If there was a list of people she would have stood up to and made mad, it would be five pages long.”

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