Carol Jenkins was a 21-year-old African-American woman who was stabbed once through the right atrium of her heart in a racist murder which occurred as she attempted to sell encyclopedias door to door in Martinsville, Indiana on September 16, 1968. Her murder occurred in an almost exclusively white city with a documented history of racial segregation. The perpetrators of her murder were two white men—one of whom has never been identified. The murder itself was widely reported in local and national media and 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 ( Gooden) Jenkins. Her father was a general laborer, and her mother a bookkeeper.
Jenkins's parents divorced when she was an infant; her mother retained custody of her, with her father subsequently relocating to Columbus. Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth Jenkins began dating a machine repairman named Paul Willard Davis, who accepted and raised Jenkins as his own child. The couple relocated to Rushville, where they married in September 1949. He and Elizabeth would have five more children—Paulette, Patricia Ann, Larry, Robert, and Laura Mae—prior to divorcing amicably in 1967. All six siblings were raised impartially, and all maintained contact with both parents following their divorce. Her family was religious and regularly attended services at Rushville's Wesley United Methodist Church.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Rushville was a relatively small and predominantly white rural town with a population of approximately 7,000 inhabitants. Jenkins and her siblings were among the few black students at Rushville High School, although they seldom experienced any discrimination and had both black and white friends. By her teens, Jenkins aspired to move to Chicago and become either a fashion model or, due to her love of children, a teacher. She grew to be () tall and approximately 110 pounds and has been described as a slightly introverted yet friendly, intelligent and polite young woman.
Shortly after graduating from Rushville High School in 1965, Jenkins obtained employment upon an assembly line at the plant of the Philco Division of the Ford Motor Company in Connersville, Indiana; here, she became acquainted with a welder one year her senior named John Wesley Scales Jr. Shortly thereafter, the two began dating. By early 1968, Jenkins and Scales had become engaged; on March 4, both applied for a marriage license.
Jenkins remained in the same employment until the summer of 1968, when a 64-day union strike saw approximately 3,500 union members refuse to work, thus temporarily causing the plant's closure. Due to this ongoing strike, plus the fact Jenkins had by 1968 moved into her own rented home, she and four other female employees including her close friend Paula Norene Bradley resolved to find temporary 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 and had just completed an intense three-day sales training course in Indianapolis 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, Daniel Julian (30) and colleagues John Burton (20) and her friend Paula Bradley (19). Both males were white, with Bradley of both black and Caucasian ancestry and markedly light-skinned.
Due to travel logistics, en route to Vincennes, the sales crew's plans changed, with their sales destination changing to Martinsville, Indiana—a known sundown town, yet considerably closer to Rushville than Vincennes. 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 sweater, a pair of olive-green wool pants, and a brown jacket.
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 close to the city's central square 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 initially called upon later informed police they had found Jenkins to be a pleasant and intelligent young woman, with one resident—noting she was not appropriately dressed for the evening's forecast rainfall—giving her a bright yellow paisley scarf. 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 Donald Lee and Norma Jean ( Campbell) 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. Jenkins informed the Neals this vehicle had been following her for several minutes, with the occupants shouting racial abuse. Donald Neal exited his home. Moments later, the parked Comet drove away from the scene. Donald also observed a light-colored sedan with its parking lights on parked nearby; he made a mental note of the license plate number before this vehicle also drove away.
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, although she believed that one of the men had been fairly short. She also refused his offer to drive her to the local Sunoco service station on Morgan Street, where she was to meet her colleagues. Having been provided with a description of the vehicle by Donald Neal, Richards briefly patrolled the vicinity of the Neal residence in an unsuccessful effort to locate the vehicle.
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 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." Norma then briefly drove Jenkins around the neighborhood in an unsuccessful effort to locate one of her colleagues before driving back to her home.
At approximately 8:30 p.m., Jenkins—again 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 by a young man, who later described her demeanor as "cheerful", adding that, as he passed her on the street, she had said "Hello" to him.
Murder Approximately thirty minutes after leaving the Neal residence, as Jenkins walked alone along East Morgan Street (then known as State Road 37), 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 chest with a flat-blade screwdriver, penetrating her chest to a depth of 4.4 centimeters, fracturing her sternum and piercing the right atrium of her heart. 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 close to the corner of North Graham Street as a car sped from the scene. 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 restaurant to call for help. Jenkins was promptly taken to the Morgan County Hospital, where she was pronounced dead at 9:25 p.m.
By 10:15 p.m., both Paula Bradley and John Burton had arrived at the crew's agreed rendezvous point on Morgan Street; both were told by their sales manager at this time that Jenkins had been murdered.
An examination of the crime scene yielded little physical evidence. The murder weapon was never located, 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 glasses were discovered three feet from her folder, and her notebook was discovered in the entrance to an auto-repair shop 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.
Funeral Carol Marie Jenkins was laid to rest on the afternoon of September 19, 1968. She was laid to rest within East Hill Cemetery in Rush County, Indiana, following a service held in accordance with her Methodist faith at the Moster Mortuary attended by scores of mourners both black and white. Numerous eulogies were recited at the service, and six of her former high school classmates served as pallbearers.
Initial investigation Despite the known racist reputation of Martinsville and Jenkins's documented experiences of racial harassment and intimidation in the ninety minutes leading to her death, investigators rapidly discounted the theory her murder had been racially motivated—instead alluding to the theory her murder was most likely a random killing. Police inquiries into Jenkins's background revealed she had no known enemies, and the fact she knew nobody in Martinsville—plus the fact her sales crew had opted to travel to the city as opposed to Vincennes in a last-minute decision—made any personal motive for her death unlikely. Furthermore, she had not been robbed or raped, thus enabling investigators to conclusively discount robbery as a motive for her death, although they could not discount the theory she may have died as the result of an attempted sexual assault.