Murder of Carol Jenkins
The murder of Carol Jenkins is an American racist murder which occurred in Martinsville, Indiana on September 16, 1968, in which a 21-year-old African-American woman was stabbed once through the right atrium of her heart while selling encyclopedias door to door in a predominantly white city with a long history of racial tensions. The perpetrators of her murder were two white men—one of whom has never been identified. The murder itself has been described as one of Indiana's most notorious cold cases of the civil rights era.
Jenkins's murder remained unsolved for over thirty years until the daughter of one of the perpetrators provided a tip to investigators naming her father, Kenneth Clay Richmond, as one of the perpetrators of the murder. Richmond–a Ku Klux Klan affiliate–was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in May 2002; however, a Morgan County Superior Court judge later declared him incompetent to stand trial due to his declining health. Richmond himself died of bladder cancer two weeks after this ruling.
Carol Jenkins is sometimes referred to as the Girl in the Yellow Scarf due to an item of clothing she wore at the time of her murder which Richmond's daughter–who witnessed the murder as a seven-year-old child–distinctively recalled in her memory; this item of clothing Jenkins wore at the time of her murder had been information which investigators had withheld from the public.
Early life
Carol Marie Jenkins was born in Franklin, Indiana, on April 21, 1947, the only child born to Carl Egbert and Elizabeth Ann Jenkins. Her father was a general labourer, and her mother a bookkeeper.Jenkins's parents divorced when she was an infant. In September 1949, her mother married a local factory worker named Paul Willard Davis. The marriage was held in Rushville. Paul raised Jenkins as his own child. He and Elizabeth would have five more children—Paulette, Patricia, Larry, Robert, and Laura Mae—all of whom looked up to her as their big sister.
Jenkins aspired to move to Chicago and become a model. She grew to be tall and approximately 110 pounds. Her family was religious, and regularly attended services at Rushville's Wesley United Methodist Church.
Shortly after graduating from Rushville High School in 1965, she obtained employment at the plant of the Philco Division of the Ford Motor Company in Connersville, Indiana. She worked in this employment until the summer of 1968 when a union strike temporarily caused the plant's closure. Due to this ongoing strike, Jenkins and four other female employees including her close friend Carol Paula Bradley resolved to find alternate employment.
Encyclopedia saleswoman
That September, Jenkins obtained employment with a Collier's Encyclopedia sales crew as a door-to-door saleswoman. She had been in this employment for a matter of days when, at approximately 4:30 p.m. on Monday, September 16, she and three others traveled Vincennes, Indiana. Each had several encyclopedias in their possession. Accompanying Jenkins were her sales manager, Stanley Julian and colleagues John Burton and her friend Carol Paula Bradley. Both males were white, with Bradley of both black and Caucasian ancestry and markedly light-skinned.En route to Vincennes, the sales crew's plans changed, with their sales destination changing to Martinsville, Indiana—a known sundown town. As Jenkins was traveling with three co-workers, she may have believed she would be safe, although she is known to have remarked to Bradley shortly before embarking on her sales route: "Well, I'm glad I wore pants today because I might have to run." She was dressed in a white cotton turtleneck, a pair of olive-green wool pants, a brown jacket, and a bright yellow scarf.
September 16, 1968
Martinsville sales route
In Martinsville, the three junior members of the sales crew took separate sales routes, with Jenkins assigned a route on the eastern side of the city, Bradley the western side, and Burton the north. All three were given instructions to meet their colleagues at a delegated rendezvous point at an agreed later time.Initially, Jenkins encountered little or no bigotry or harassment as she canvassed her assigned route, and several residents of homes she called upon later informed police they had found Jenkins to be a pleasant and intelligent young woman. However, somewhere in the vicinity of Columbus Drive, two young white men in a black 1965 or 1966 model Mercury Comet began to follow Jenkins, hurling racial slurs and other derogatory comments. Evidently, this experience greatly unnerved Jenkins as at approximately 7:40 p.m., she approached the home of a young, recently married white couple named Don and Norma Neal, seeking help and asking them: "Please let me in. I've got somebody following me." The Neals allowed Jenkins into their home as the Comet initially remained parked outside their home before driving away. Jenkins informed the Neals this vehicle had been following her for several minutes.
The Neals telephoned the police, and an officer named Clarence Richards was dispatched to their home. According to Richards, Jenkins was unable to provide an accurate description of the young men who had harassed her or their vehicle, and she refused his offer to drive her to the local service station where she was to meet her colleagues. After Richards left the Neal residence, the couple offered to let Jenkins stay at their home until she was scheduled to meet her three colleagues at their agreed time of 9 p.m. Jenkins thanked them but turned down the offer, saying: "No, I've bothered you people long enough, I'll just go on back."
At approximately 8:30 p.m., Jenkins—accompanied by Norma Neal—left the Neal household; the two walked several blocks together. Norma accompanied Jenkins to the corner of East Columbus Street and Home Avenue, from where Jenkins continued walking to her scheduled rendezvous point alone as Norma Neal returned home at the beginning of a heavy rainfall. Jenkins was last seen alive minutes later walking alone in the vicinity of Home Avenue and Washington Street.
Murder
Approximately thirty minutes after leaving the Neal residence, as Jenkins walked alone along East Morgan Street, two men pulled their car to the side of the road and exited the vehicle. Jenkins's arms were held behind her back by one assailant, while the other stabbed her once in the heart with a screwdriver. The two then fled the scene. An eyewitness named Hayward Bellah—who witnessed the aftermath of Jenkins's stabbing—later informed investigators that, minutes after 9 p.m., having heard commotion across the street from his apartment, he had looked out his window and observed Jenkins staggering approximately twenty feet before falling onto the rain-soaked sidewalk. Bellah ran from his apartment to find Jenkins unresponsive on the sidewalk; he was unable to detect a pulse, although he was able to note her "gasping for air". Bellah then ran to a nearby bar to call for help. Jenkins was promptly taken to the Morgan County Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m.An examination of the crime scene yielded little physical evidence, although Jenkins's sales route folder was discovered approximately twenty feet from her body, indicating she had either dropped the folder at the site of her initial assault, or the item had been torn from her possession at this location. Her notebook was discovered approximately 170 feet from her body, indicating Jenkins may have been chased for up to 150 feet before her assailants exited their vehicle and fatally stabbed her.
Jenkins's father insisted that, due to the racist past of Martinsville, the police bring in the FBI to help investigate, but the police refused. Davis later said, "I felt that because she was a black girl, nobody did anything."
Arrest
In June 2000, Carol's mother, Elizabeth, received an anonymous phone call from someone revealing the name of the killer. Elizabeth told Paul, who dipped into his retirement savings to hire a private investigator to look into it. After the Indiana State Police got wind of Paul's effort, they assigned two cold case investigators to look back into the murder. In November 2001, the investigators received an anonymous letter naming the killer—Kenneth Clay Richmond. The letter also said that Richmond's daughter, Shirley, had witnessed the murder.For more than 33 years, the murder of Jenkins remained unsolved. On May 8, 2002, police arrested Kenneth Richmond in an Indianapolis nursing home. Upon his arrest, Richmond was found to be a 70-year-old career criminal with a history of bizarre behavior and affiliation with groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. At the time of the killing, Richmond lived on a nearby Hendricks County farm and was just passing through Martinsville on the night Jenkins was murdered.
Richmond's estranged daughter, Shirley, now married with the last name McQueen, corroborated the details of Carol's murder, including items of clothing that Jenkins was wearing on the night of her murder which never had been revealed to the public. To both police and, later, an investigative reporter, McQueen stated: "If the girl had a yellow scarf and was killed with a screwdriver, my Dad could be the killer."
Detectives believed that the information given about the murder was accurate and they had found one of the killers. The police realized that they would not have found Shirley if it had not been for the anonymous phone call and letter. Both the call and the letter had been provided by 46-year-old Connie McQueen, Shirley McQueen's former sister-in-law. Shirley had confided in Connie about the murder, and Connie felt compelled to do something fifteen years after being told about the murder by Shirley McQueen.
Shirley McQueen confirmed that, as a 7-year-old, she watched from the back seat of a car as her father, and another man—who had been riding around drinking together—killed Carol Jenkins. McQueen stated that, when her father and the unknown assailant got back into the car, Richmond laughed and said of Jenkins, "She got what she deserved." As they drove away, McQueen looked back and saw Jenkins fall next to a bush.
McQueen later stated that, as they drove back home, Richmond gave her seven dollars—one dollar for each year of her life—to keep his daughter quiet about what she had witnessed.
Aftermath
Richmond never went to trial for Jenkins's murder, nor was his accomplice ever identified. He was declared incompetent to stand trial and, two weeks later, on August 31, 2002, he died of bladder cancer.Following the murder, Don and Norma Neal received constant harassment and death threats after it was revealed that they tried to help Jenkins.
In 2014, the Neals proposed a monument in Martinsville in Carol's memory. However, the plans were scrapped after the county commissioner, Norman Voyles, said that he "started getting flack" about it.
A community park in Rushville, Indiana was rededicated in Jenkins's name on November 1, 2017, and a memory stone was placed in the garden of Martinsville's city hall on November 2, 2017.