George Wallace

George & Lurleen B. Wallace are shown in this undated file photo. (AL.com file)

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) says it destroyed records related to former Alabama Gov. Lurleen Wallace, who occupied the governor's mansion for less than two years in the 1960s.

On Jan. 7, AL.com submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to the FBI for its records on a number of deceased former Alabama governors. Thus far, the bureau has only responded to a request for records related to former Gov. Lurleen Brigham Burns Wallace, who rose to prominence as former Gov. George Wallace's wife and first lady.

The FBI told AL.com in a letter dated March 3 that, "records which may have been responsive to your request were destroyed on June 29, 2007 and July 25, 2007. Since this material could not be reviewed, it is not known if it was responsive to your request." As such, the FBI was unable to provide any files related to Lurleen Wallace, though in stating that records were destroyed, the agency admitted that it at least had files on her until the summer of 2007.

The letter goes on to explain that the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) supervises "record retention and disposal," and that it monitors the "FBI Records Retention Plan and Disposition Schedules."

Lurleen Wallace succeeded her husband in the governorship, being elected Jan. 16, 1967, after her husband's second term (the Alabama constitution barred him from running for a third term) came to a close.

Still the only woman to ever serve as governor of Alabama, she occupied that role until she succumbed to cancer on May 7, 1968. Born in Tuscaloosa on Sept. 19, 1926, Gov. Lurleen Wallace passed away in Montgomery.

The NARA and the FBI Records Retention Plan have long been criticized for not being sufficiently protective of important historical documents. Many writers, historians and legal advocates say that the existing system for record retention allows the FBI to destroy many potentially important files.

Slate reporter Alex Heard spoke with FOIA experts about the retention plan and NARA in 2008.The plan for retaining records "sounded more like a Records Destruction Plan, since it allows the FBI to discard roughly 80 percent of its files at any given time," Heard wrote at the time.

"The FBI would have you believe the plan is a best-of-all-possible-worlds compromise that preserves the essential and discards only the unworthy. Don't buy it. Though the NARA experts who helped create the plan tried to come up with a fair, workable system, the bottom line is that the FBI gets to trash mountains of historical source material without adequate oversight. And there is nothing the public--which owns the records, after all--can do to stop it."