Ashley Flowers

And they weren't taking a good hard look at their own department to see if the case was mismanaged.

Instead, they were interested to know if Alberta's case could be connected to another woman's death.

Her name was Decora White, and she'd also been found dead in the river a year before Alberta, except no autopsy was even done on her, and they just assumed that she fell in the river and drowned.

So the theory went that maybe like Alberta was doing some legal estate work for Decorah, but Alberta's family basically like shut that down.

She's like, not only was Alberta not working with Decorah, they didn't even know each other personally.

And long story short, police ended up saying that they couldn't connect the cases because none of the people in Decorah's case matched the prints in Alberta's.

Yeah.

So, like, I wouldn't be using that as an excuse to write a theory off, which is probably why they went looking to see if they could link other evidence to Decorah's case.

But here in 1988 is when they find out, oh, guess what?

Almost all of it's gone.

Photos.

We know the fingerprints are gone.

The blood samples gone.

Police had sent some of it off for testing.

Some, I guess, went to the FBI.

But detectives were calling around and they just could not track this stuff down.

Obviously, that 1988 investigation didn't get anywhere.

And knowing that evidence was now mostly gone, destroyed, missing, whatever, it's not like there was much to go back and test over the years like we see with so many other cold cases.

All they had were a couple of OK fingerprint cards.

But Officer Elliott saving those cards from the trash would turn out to be one of the most important moves in this whole case.