Murder of Carol Jenkins

A community park in Rushville, Indiana was rededicated in Jenkins' name (as Carol Jenkins-Davis Park) on November 1, 2017, and a memory stone was placed in the garden of Martinsville's city hall on November 2, 2017.

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.

For more than 33 years, the murder of Jenkins remained unsolved. On May 8, 2002, police arrested Kenneth C. 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 never went to trial for Jenkins' 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.

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.

Carol Jenkins was an African-American woman who was murdered on September 16, 1968, by two white men in a sundown town in Indiana. Her murder remained unsolved for over thirty years until a tip led investigators to one of her alleged killers in the early 2000s. Her alleged killer, Kenneth Clay Richmond, who was affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan, was declared incompetent to stand trial and died of bladder cancer in 2002. His accomplice was never identified.

In September 1968, 20-year-old Carol—dressed in a white cotton turtleneck, a pair of olive-green wool pants, a brown jacket, and a bright yellow scarf—embarked on her first day of selling encyclopedias door-to-door. To impress her boss, she volunteered to go to Martinsville, Indiana. Martinsville was known to be a sundown town, yet Carol thought she would be safe that evening, as she would be traveling there with three co-workers—two white men and a 19-year-old black woman.

As a teenager, Carol wanted to move to Chicago and become a model. In 1965, shortly after graduating from Rushville High School, she got a job at the plant of the Philco Division of the Ford Motor Company. Carol worked there until a union strike temporarily shut the plant down. Looking to supplement her income, she took a job as a door-to-door saleswoman for Collier's, selling encyclopedias.

Carol Jenkins was born to Elizabeth Jenkins in Franklin, Indiana in 1947. Her mother divorced her father when Carol was still an infant. Elizabeth would later marry Paul Davis, a local factory worker in nearby Rushville.