“They knew who he was, they did nothing, and as a result, Eliza Fletcher ends up being murdered when [the suspect] he should have been in jail,” the woman’s attorney, Gary Smith, told The Daily Beast. “If they had done their job, she would be alive.” Alicia Franklin, 22, says she met Cleotha “Cleo” Abston on Sept. 21, 2021—almost a year before Fletcher was kidnapped and killed. In her complaint, she says the two met on a dating app and made a plan to meet at the apartment complex where she worked before going out to dinner. Instead, she claims, Abston pulled a gun on her and forced her into an empty apartment, blindfolding her with a T-shirt and threatening to kill her. He walked her through the apartment and to his car, where he says he forced her into the back seat and raped her. Franklin says she was pregnant at the time and told Abston, to which she said he replied, “All you bitches say that.” At the time, Abston had recently been released from prison after serving 20 years for a kidnapping and robbery in 2001. According to the lawsuit, that meant his DNA and other information was available in an FBI database for comparison if he committed other crimes. Franklin reported the incident to law enforcement immediately, providing them with the suspect’s name, phone number, a description of his car and information about the dating app where they met. He also completed a rape kit, which, when tested, would ultimately link the crime to Abston. But the rape kit wasn’t completed for another nine months, until June 24, according to the lawsuit. A final report wasn’t issued until Aug. 29, and the DNA information wasn’t entered into the national law enforcement system until Sept. 5 — three days after Fletcher was abducted on her morning run. The kidnapping of Fletcher—the granddaughter of the founder of multibillion-dollar hardware distributor Orgill, Inc.—sparked national headlines and a multi-agency investigation. The 37-year-old mother of two was last seen jogging near the University of Memphis campus on September 2. Her body was later found in an abandoned house nearby. Surveillance footage from the area of the abduction showed a man putting Fletcher into his car and struggling with her inside. According to the complaint, police ordered a “rush warrant” for DNA from a pair of sandals found near the scene of the abduction, and it was quickly matched to genetic material entered after Abston’s conviction in 2001. They also obtained surveillance footage of Abston wearing the sandals, they located his car and followed him to his residence. He was arrested and charged with kidnapping Fletcher on September 4 and murdering her shortly after her body was found. Abston was also charged with aggravated rape, aggravated kidnapping and unlawful possession of a weapon in connection with the Sept. 8 rape of Franklin. But in her complaint, Franklin argues that Fletcher’s killing could have been prevented if her rape kit had been processed earlier, or other drivers more thoroughly investigated. She notes that police even showed her a photo of Abston in a lineup of suspects at the time she reported, but she was unable to identify him at the time. (She claims police offered to pull a more recent photo of Abston to show her, since the photo in the lineup was over a decade old, but never did.) Franklin also claims she called to follow up on her case a month later and was told there were no updates. “They said, ‘Well, just keep in mind that it could take a year or two to process a rape kit,’” she told the Daily Memphian. “So at that point, I gave up.” A spokesman for the police department said the department does not comment on pending litigation. Smith, the Franklin attorney, is currently representing a number of women in a proposed class-action lawsuit against Memphis over a rape package hoarding. The women are among 12,000 victims whose kits were discovered by Memphis police to prevent testing in 2013. That case is still awaiting class-action certification by a judge. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation told a local Fox station that the turnaround time for the rape kit test was anywhere from 33 to 49 weeks. The lab in Jackson where Franklin’s kit was tested averaged nearly 350 requests for sexual assault evidence a month, according to The Tennessean, putting wait times at the high end of that range. TBI Communications Director Josh DeVine told The Tennessean that his agency had the most submitted cases analyzed per scientist of the six surrounding states. The office requested funding for 40 more forensic scientists during the last budget cycle, according to local news outlet WKRN, but received only half of what they requested. They are in the process of hiring new candidates to start at the end of October. In her suit, Franklin claimed that if the police had followed any of her instructions or ordered a rape kit rape test, Fletcher’s murder may never have happened. “They had more than enough evidence that night when they interviewed me to get him off the streets. But they didn’t,” Franklin told Good Morning America. She added: “I’m angry. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about that.
