When the Donald family’s lawyer, State Senator Michael Figures, suggested that “extremists” were involved, according to a 1989 article in the Los Angeles Times, white people accused him of “stirring up racism.”

When the drug-dealer and affair theories didn’t pan out, police “tried to gather evidence that Donald had led a secret criminal life.” Learner detailed their efforts. “A white transvestite prostitute volunteered that he had slept with Donald and that the teenager was a “hustler.” When the prostitute saw Donald’s photo in the paper, he admitted it did not look like the man he knew, but the police, nonetheless, tried to validate his story. They found someone else who said that Donald was a drug dealer.”

The fact that a prominent Klansman recently owned property across the street was seen as simply more evidence the Klan could not have been responsible. The head detective believed “the Klan would not lynch somebody practically on their own front lawn,” according to Leamer. The cops told the FBI this was a simple street crime, so they lost interest.

It would later become clear that Donald had been lynched because the Klan sought to make an example of any black man it could find. A mistrial had recently been declared in the prosecution of a black man, Josephus Anderson who had killed a white police officer named Gene Ballard. (Anderson was later retried and convicted.)

Witnesses later testified that Bennie Jack Hays, the second-highest-ranking Klansman in Alabama, had said at a KKK meeting after the mistrial, and two days before Donald’s death, “If a black man can kill a white man, a white man should be able to get away with killing a black man.” Hays told the two Klansmen who eventually carried out the lynching that they shouldn’t do it until after he closed on the sale of a pair of properties on the street where they intended to leave the body.

“The police department told me when they looked at it, ‘You’ll never solve that case, it’s just an unsolvable case,’” said Bob Eddy, a former state criminal investigator who worked the Donald case. “You just have to know the climate in those times, most of those guys who were law enforcement, not all of them, but most of those guys, a lot of those guys, they didn’t care if you killed a black guy.”

The Donald family later said that the motivation behind the murder was immediately obvious to them. “Black people don’t hang people,” Donald’s sister Betty Wyatt told Michael Wilson of the Mobile Register in 1997. The black community in Mobile organized protests to express their frustration with authorities and the lack of progress in the case, and civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson and Joseph Lowery urged them to keep up the fight.

Michael Figures’s brother Thomas, an assistant U.S. attorney then working under Jeff Sessions, and the only black assistant U.S. attorney in the state, watched as the local authorities botched the investigation. According to Leamer, Thomas Figures was “endlessly” persistent in trying to get the civil-rights division in Washington, D.C., to reopen the investigation into Donald’s murder, and worked with an FBI agent named James Bodman to obtain the evidence needed to reopen the case. The New York Times Magazine and the Mobile Register likewise credited Figures as the driving force behind getting the Justice Department to take a second look at the killing.