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Cleotha Abston-Henderson, 38, charged with raping a woman a year ago in addition to kidnapping and murdering Eliza Fletcher
A rape survivor in Memphis has bravely broken her silence, accusing police of failing to investigate thoroughly before her alleged attacker was charged with kidnapping and murdering jogger Eliza Fletcher last month.
Alicia Franklin, 22, spoke out in an interview published in the Daily Memphis on Monday, volunteered to be publicly identified, saying, “I feel my story can help other women.”
Cleotha Abston-Henderson, 38, is now charged with raping Franklin nearly a year ago — but charges were only filed after he was arrested and charged with the Sept. 2 murder of Fletcher, who was kidnapped while on a morning jog.
Henderson pleaded not guilty to the murder but has not yet responded to the rape charge. He was due to appear in court on Monday, but the hearing was moved to September 28.
While the DNA evidence of Fletcher’s kidnapping was tested within hours, the rape kit in Franklin’s case sat on a shelf for months, and she says police failed to take basic steps, such as collecting fingerprints after she was violent. attacked.
“I just don’t think it was a priority,” Franklin said. “I was just your average black girl in the city of Memphis, you know.”
A survivor of a rape in Memphis bravely broke her silence by saying that the police had not followed clear leads for nearly a year, until the suspect Henderson allegedly killed a woman
The accused murderer of Eliza Fletcher was arrested just days after the kindergarten teacher (above) was kidnapped. But the rape case against him languished for a year despite strong evidence
A Memphis Police Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from DailyMail.com Monday afternoon.
Fletcher, who was white, was a kindergarten teacher and the granddaughter of a wealthy businessman. Her kidnapping drew national attention and a massive police response.
Franklin, who grew up in poverty and takes classes online, says the police response to her own violent kidnapping and rape case has been remarkably different.
In September 2021, Franklin says she met a man she only knew as “Cleo” through the online dating app Plenty Of Fish, and agreed to meet him at a large apartment complex in southeast Memphis.
His invitation had originally been to meet for dinner at Olive Garden, but when Franklin said her car was running on a spare tire and she didn’t want to drive that far, they agreed to meet in what he said was his apartment. .
But when she arrived, she said Henderson held a gun to her neck and led her to one of the apartments, which appeared to be empty and under renovation.
Henderson pleaded not guilty to the murder, but has not yet responded to the rape charge
There he blindfolded her with a T-shirt and led her to a white Dodge Charger, where he attacked her and then took her to the apartment. It was a terrifying ordeal she hadn’t expected to survive.
“I really thought he was going to shoot me in the back of the head,” she told the Daily Memphian.
‘Can you please let me go? Please, let me go,” she recalled, begging her attacker.
After the attack, the attacker rummaged through her bag, touched her keys and cell phone, stole some money and left her.
But Franklin says police didn’t fingerprint her phone and dropped the ball on a crucial clue — the address of the apartment where the attack took place.
According to a police incident report, the apartment is located at 5783 Waterstone Oak Way, a few doors from where Henderson appears to live, and where he was arrested a year later for the murder of Fletcher.
Franklin also says she gave police her attacker’s phone number.
Franklin was attacked in this apartment complex last year — but police have made no arrests, despite suspect Henderson living the door away from the crime scene
Police did present Franklin with a set of photos, but they said they could not confidently identify Henderson because the photo of him they had with it was old and showed him a dreadlock haircut that he no longer wore.
“They never showed me an updated photo. I called two or three months later and said, ‘Hey, you know, (the detective) said she would, you know, try to do another photo lineup with updated photos and… I haven’t heard from them. her,” Franklin recalled.
“And then they said, ‘Oh well, she’s since been promoted, so she’s no longer the detective on your case,'” the victim said.
A trail of evidence led to Henderson’s arrest in Fletcher’s murder just days after the jogger disappeared on her morning run.
He was transferred to the Shelby County Jail on September 9 on charges related to the 2021 rape case.
Law enforcement officers have said his charges against those charges did not come before Fletcher’s murder because of the timing in testing his DNA in the rape case.
In the case of Fletcher’s kidnapping, Henderson was identified as a suspect in just 18 hours, after a sandal left at the crime scene was returned with a match to his DNA.
His DNA was already in police databases due to a previous felony conviction.
Henderson previously served 20 years in prison for a kidnapping he committed at the age of 16.