Ashley Flowers

And Detective Lancaster ends his letter to the major saying they need to contact Sergeant Miller and find out what he did with the prints...

Or contact the FBI and see if maybe they have them.

And what is nuts here is that there is nothing in the file about anyone ever questioning Miller about the prints, about where the prints are or why he may have thrown them in the trash.

Instead, he continued working the case and handling evidence even after those prints got thrown away.

That wouldn't be the only time in this case that evidence was destroyed.

No one knows exactly when this next thing happened because no one caught it like Lancaster did the Prince.

Or if they did, a memorandum about what happened didn't survive in the file.

But in 1988, investigators decided to take another look at Alberta's case.

They still weren't looking at the possibility that Alberta was targeted because of her civil rights work.

They weren't trying to figure out if she was being followed or who was tapping her phone.

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.