The murder of Carol Jenkins

The murder of Carol Jenkins was solved by new witness evidence that surfaced more than three decades after the crime, not by any forensic method. In 1968 the investigation produced no usable physical link to a killer; the screwdriver thought to be the weapon and the two men who attacked Jenkins remained unidentified, and within weeks the case had gone cold. Two local men who had been seen following and taunting Jenkins turned themselves in days after the killing but were cleared after their alibis checked out, and federal and civil-rights interest, including a telegram from the NAACP to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, did not produce a prosecutable suspect. Over the years the file passed through different hands; Jenkins's stepfather, Paul Davis, hired a private investigator, and the Indiana State Police eventually maintained a cold-case effort that kept the matter alive. The decisive development came in November 2001, when the Martinsville Police Department received an anonymous handwritten letter. The letter named Kenneth Clay Richmond as the man who had killed Jenkins and said that Richmond's youngest daughter, Shirley, had witnessed the murder as a child of about seven and had years earlier confided what she had seen to the letter's author. When investigators located Shirley Richmond McQueen the following month, she confirmed the account. She described riding in her father's car as a small child when he and a passenger spotted Jenkins, taunted her, stopped the car, and chased her on foot; her father, she said, stabbed Jenkins while the other man held the young woman, and the two men drove away laughing. McQueen also said her father had given her money afterward and told her to keep the attack a secret. What persuaded detectives that her memory was genuine was a single corroborating detail she volunteered that had been deliberately withheld from the press for decades: the color of an item Jenkins had been wearing, a yellow scarf that a sympathetic Martinsville resident had given her against the rain. Because that fact had never been public, McQueen could only have known it by having been present. On the strength of her eyewitness account and the corroboration it provided, Kenneth Clay Richmond was arrested at an Indianapolis nursing home on May 8, 2002, and formally charged with first-degree murder, the first and only person ever charged in the case. Richmond, a man with a long criminal record and documented ties to the Ku Klux Klan, denied the charge. As pretrial proceedings went forward, his health collapsed, and a court ruled him incompetent to stand trial because of advanced cancer. He died on August 31, 2002, at age 70, roughly two weeks after that ruling, having never been tried and, by most accounts, maintaining his denial to the end, although some reports state he confessed near death. His alleged accomplice, described by McQueen only as a tall man she could not name, has never been identified, and no one has been convicted of the crime.