On the night of August 4, 1965, Alberta Jones was relaxing at home after a long day at work. She lived with her mother Sadie and her sister Flora at 3237 Virginia Ave. in Louisville’s predominantly Black West End. The women were sitting together in their living room, Flora and Sadie talking and Alberta reading the Saturday Evening Post. That week’s edition of the newsmagazine featured an article about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and while she was reading this story Alberta turned to her sister and made a hauntingly premonitory comment: “I hope they don’t assassinate me like they did President Kennedy.” To which Flora could only reply, “You don’t need to worry about that. You’re not the President of the United States.”

Around 11:30 p.m., not long after this exchange, the phone rang. The caller was Gladys Wyckoff, a close friend of Alberta’s. Gladys worked as a beautician and operated a salon in the building where she lived at 2105 W. Broadway. Sadie answered the phone, and Gladys told her that Alberta needed to come to her salon and pick up a wig that she had ordered from Gladys. Sadie called Alberta over to the phone, but remained in the room and later reported what she heard of the conversation during the Coroner’s Inquest.

Gladys told Alberta to come up to the salon and get her wig. Being that it was almost midnight, Alberta told her no, that it was too late. Gladys then began to press her about a different matter. She had sought Alberta’s advice in dealing with one of her employees who had an issue with the state beauticians licensing board. Sadie heard Alberta tell Gladys, “You wouldn’t be in any trouble if you did what I told you to do, but you go right on and do the opposite. There’s no need for me coming up there because there’s nothing I can do tonight.” Gladys continued to push Alberta to come see her, moving the conversation back to her picking up the wig, and Alberta continued to push back, telling her that it was too late and the wig could wait for another time. But Gladys was clearly determined to get Alberta to come over to her place, and she finally found a winning argument when she complained that Alberta had become “uppity” since becoming a prosecutor, saying she never made time for her friends who were just “regular folks.” At this Alberta finally relented, telling Sadie, “I guess I’ll go see what that old fool wants,” as she hung up the phone. She threw on a green and white striped house dress over her slip, stepped into a pair of simple black shoes, grabbed her purse, and said goodbye to her mother and sister for what would be the last time.

On the night of her murder Alberta was driving a rental car, a white 1965 Ford Fairlane, because her pink 1964 Thunderbird was in the shop due to a damaged water pump. She drove the rental car to Gladys’s home/salon a couple miles away. Gladys brought her into the salon and had her try on the wig. Shortly after Alberta arrived, she announced that she was hungry and wanted to go get something to eat, so she and Gladys got in the rented Fairlane and drove uptown to the Kingfish Restaurant at 4th St. and River Rd. about seven miles away from the salon. They ate their food in the car and presumably discussed Gladys’s troubles with her employee and her issues with the licensing board. Gladys’s employee, an apprentice, had gone before the board to get her official beautician’s license. She was told to bring her own tools for the examination and brought supplies used for “cold wave” styles, the primary styling method used in Gladys’s salon. When she arrived she was told that as a Black beautician, she had to complete the test using hot irons for “heat wave” styles which had been the primary method for styling Black hair in the past. Because she did not have the supplies to give a “heat wave,” she was not allowed to take the exam. The employee had brought this issue to the Louisville Defender which published an article on the subject in the issue which would be released on August 5th.

By the time they left Kingfish it was well after midnight, and they decided to see if they could find a copy of the magazine. They first went to Union Station at 10th and Broadway, but when this proved unsuccessful they continued to Catherine’s Eat Shop at 15th and Broadway. Alberta went into the restaurant and purchased a copy of the magazine. She brought it back out to the car, and she and Gladys sat under a street lamp to read the article. When they finished reading the piece Alberta went back inside to buy a second copy and a soda. After this they returned to Gladys’s home where they talked for more than an hour.

Alberta reportedly left around 2:00 a.m. and headed home. Her route took her back down Broadway, and on the way she stopped at a convenience store at the 28th Street intersection where she bought a soft drink. From there she would have taken 28th St. south to Virginia Ave. and then continued west to her home at #3237 where she never arrived.

Around 2:15 a.m. a couple living on Magazine St., two blocks north of the convenience store where she was last seen, reported being woken by the sound of a woman screaming outside their home and said that when they looked outside they saw a woman being dragged by a man into the back of a car. Because Magazine St. would have been out of her way to get home Police theorized that her abductors forced their way into her car at a stop sign and forced her into the back seat. This likely happened at 28th and Broadway, possibly even when she stopped at the convenience store. From there her abductors would’ve driven north on 28th to where she apparently briefly escaped from the car on Magazine St. near Elliott park, only to be dragged back and returned to the car.

The next morning around 10:30 a.m. Alberta Jones’s body was found floating face down in the Ohio River by a group of young teenage boys playing in the shallow waters around Shawnee Park near the Fontaine Ferry Amusement Park. She was fully clothed, but her shoes and purse were missing, as well as her dentures and the wig she supposedly bought from Gladys that night. She had suffered several blows to the head, but none of these was severe enough to cause fatal trauma. She had two lacerations in her forehead- a gash in her left eyebrow and a gouged wound near the bridge of her nose. A large hematoma on the right side of her head indicated blunt force trauma. Her right arm and leg were covered in scrapes and abrasions consistent with falling down or being dragged on that side of her body. Her autopsy confirmed that her cause of death was drowning, meaning she was alive when she hit the water.

Initial speculation postulated that she was thrown from the Sherman Minton Bridge, roughly two miles upriver from where her body was discovered, because her shoes were found the next day below the off-ramp on the Kentucky side of the bridge. However, the U.S. Corps of Engineers analyzed conditions in the river that night and determined that the current would not have been able to push her body from the bridge to the location where she was found in the time between her disappearance and the discovery of her body the next morning, reporting that the current would have carried her no more than 100 feet given the amount of time she was in the water. This means she was likely thrown into the river very close to where her body was found, with the most likely location being the Shawnee Park Boat Ramp at the foot of Market St.

Alberta’s rented Ford Fairlane was found the next day parked in the 3100 block of Del Park Terrace, just a couple of blocks west of where the couple on Magazine St. reported seeing a woman being forced into the back seat of a car matching a description of the one she was driving. Del Park Terrace actually becomes Magazine St. when it crosses the railroad tracks at 31st St. This is about half a mile inland from where her body was found.

The interior of the car showed clear signs of what homicide detectives described as “a terrific struggle.” There were bloodstains on the rear seat, in the rear floorboard, and on the back side of the bench-style front seat. Her upper denture plate had been knocked out and was found in the back seat of the car covered in blood. The back seat was also littered with fragments of brick, indicating that this was likely the weapon used to beat Alberta into unconsciousness, evidenced by a large hematoma on the side of her head. Over 30 pieces of evidence were collected from the car including a toothpick, matchbooks, cigarettes, hairs, and fingerprints, all of which were sent to the FBI for analysis.

At a memorial dinner on October 8, 1965 Louisville Safety Director Kenneth Newman announced that “in the last few days” police had “discovered some evidence which leads us to believe we are on the threshold of solving this mystery.” But no such solution ever materialized.

On November 11, 1965 a Coroner’s Inquest officially ruled that Alberta Jones “met her death due to drowning and from the evidence we have heard we believe it was at the hand of a person or persons unknown.” In the four months since her death the Louisville Police had interviewed over 300 people in relation to the case but still did not have any “good suspects.” In an interview with the Courier Journal the following summer Detective Roy Myers confessed that they “don’t have any promising leads” and “have come to a virtual standstill on the case.”

From there more than two years went by without a word on the case in local media. Then on July 16, 1968 a group of four teenage boys were climbing on a bridge structure over the center of the river discovered a black purse lodged in a hole in one of the girders. The purse was in “exceptionally good condition” and contained identification belonging to Alberta Jones. The location in which the purse was found revived the already debunked theory that she was thrown into the river from the Sherman Minton Bridge which became the dominant narrative in public discussion of the case from that point forward. At this time Sgt. Herman Mitchell of the Louisville Police Homicide Squad told the Courier Journal, “We have some real good suspects, but we have not been able to develop a case against them.”

After the discovery of the purse the trail goes completely cold. Alberta Jones is mentioned only twice in Courier Journal articles over the next decade, once in a 1971 article about unsolved homicides saying that the case was at a standstill, and once in a 1978 article about police looking back into 80 unsolved murders including that of Alberta Jones.

By this time the city had begun what seems almost like a conscious effort to forget who Alberta Jones was.