The life of Alberta Jones is famous to some and unknown to many. The civil rights pioneer and trailblazer served the city of Louisville passionately and with a sharp mind until the day she died. That day tragically came in 1965 when she was just 34 years old.

Jones has a long list of achievements. She was the first Black woman to pass the Kentucky bar exam, the first female prosecutor of any race in Louisville and the first attorney for Muhammad Ali. A graduate of Central High School, Jones went on to graduate at the top of her class at a still-segregated University of Louisville—a school she would later help to integrate—as well as top of her class at Howard University School of Law. A member of the Louisville Urban League and the NAACP, she helped to organize the March on Washington in 1963.

In addition to her achievements, she also took many steps to better the Louisville community and particularly empowered Black citizens in the city.

She served as the executive director of the Independent Voters Association, promoting education to the Black community about voting while registering more than 600,000 African Americans to vote. She also shared a law office with the late Kentucky State Representative Darryl Owens on West Broadway.

“If she felt strongly about it you didn’t have to ask her about it, she would let you know,” Owens told WHAS11 in their series on Jones.

Owens was called to identify Jones’ body when she was murdered in 1965, a case that remains unsolved and first on the list of federal civil rights era cold cases. Jones’ body was discovered in the Ohio River after she had been beaten in the head with a brick and thrown off the Sherman Minton Bridge, unconscious. Despite eyewitnesses and fingerprints discovered from the investigation, no one has been charged for the crime.

“Because things were still so segregated in Louisville then, I believe, if she had been a white woman prosecutor, they would have turned over heaven and hell to solve this,” Jones’ sister Flora Shanklin, 86, told the Washington Post. “But she was Black. They didn’t do anything about it.”

The night Jones was murdered, she received a call from a friend asking for help. She went to meet that friend—and never came home. The next morning, her family notified police that she was missing, and later her body was discovered.

It wasn’t until years after Jones’ death that a student at the Brandies School of Law took interest in the cold case. Lee Remington, an associate professor of political science at Bellarmine University and prelaw program director, is currently writing a book on Jones’ life after spending years researching the woman and her case.

After being told by police that the case was dead, Remington was given police records by a member of Jones’ family.

“In 10 minutes, I found two major discrepancies,” Remington told the Washington Post. “In the records, they said all the detectives who worked on the case were dead, which is not true.”

Remington discovered one of the detectives on the case was still alive and contacted him. They spoke at his house, where he told her he was a young detective at the time and had overseen much of the collection of evidence.

In 2008, the FBI matched a fingerprint found inside Jones’ rental car to a man who was 17 years old at the time of the murder. Despite revealing deception during a polygraph test with that man, the case was closed due to a lack of evidence.

“A tremendous amount of evidence was collected in this case—fingerprints, vacuum samples from every inch of the car by the FBI, blood samples, her purse and all of its contents (found three years later with credit cards and checks still inside), her dentures, cigarette butts from the car, her shoes, her clothes,” Remington wrote.

In 2016 Remington sent a letter to the chief of the Louisville Metro Police Department requesting the department reopen the investigation. The case remains open today.

To learn more about Jones’ life and her tragic death, please check out the series Inside Investigations: Who Killed Alberta Jones? from WHAS11.