Memphis Police/Good Morning America
On the day schoolteacher and heiress Eliza Fletcher was abducted, DNA evidence from another case that could have put her suspect behind bars was sitting in a Tennessee testing facility, unentered into the national law enforcement system. Now, the woman in the first case has filed a lawsuit against the city, claiming the police department could and should have arrested the suspect sooner.
“They knew who it was, they did nothing, and as a result, Eliza Fletcher winds up murdered when [the suspect] should have been in jail,” the woman’s lawyer, Gary Smith, told The Daily Beast. “If they had done their job, she’d be alive.”
Alicia Franklin, 22, says she met Cleotha “Cleo” Abston on Sept. 21, 2021—almost a year before Fletcher’s abduction and murder. In her complaint, she says the two met on a dating app and made a plan to meet at the apartment complex where he worked before going to dinner.
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