Ashley Flowers

Because more than 40 years after he pulled them out of the bin, thanks to new technology, one of the prints got a match.

For decades, some cold cases have been reduced to files in a cabinet, but not anymore.

I'm Ashley Flowers, and me and my team on the deck have been traveling across the country to report on these forgotten cases.

And in some instances, it's resulted in these cases being solved after decades.

Join me every Wednesday as we revive these stories one card at a time.

Listen to The Deck now, wherever you get your podcasts.

By 2008, the FBI had an automated system to quickly match even low-quality prints against a national database electronically.

And when cold case investigators in Louisville asked the FBI to run prints in Alberta's case again...

After more than four decades, they finally got some good news.

One of the prints hit on a match, and it belonged to a man in California named Arthur Porter III.

But Arthur wasn't a California native.

Back in 1965, when he would have been just 17 years old, he was living in Louisville, Kentucky.

His father owned a prominent Black-owned funeral home, the same one that Alberta's body went to.

The Louisville detective now working Alberta's case wasted no time getting on a flight out to L.A.

I mean, this was the biggest, best lead his department ever had.

And whatever was done by his department before, he was charged with solving it now.

And he wanted to talk to Arthur, who is now 61.

And it's kind of a strange interview because when he sits down with him, Arthur insists that he had nothing to do with what happened to Alberta Jones.

While at the same time, like, seeming to kind of have a little more knowledge about the situation than I would expect if he was, like, really in the dark or hadn't thought about this woman in 40 years.

Now, to be fair, when Detective Terry Jones starts this recording, he introduced himself as a homicide detective with the Louisville Police Department.