Carol Jenkins

Carol Jenkins, 21, an aspiring fashion model, was stabbed once through the heart with a screwdriver on East Morgan Street in Martinsville on the night of September 16, 1968, while selling encyclopedias door to door. Jenkins had reported being followed and harassed by two white men in a car and sought help at a stranger's home; police searched but could not find the vehicle, and Jenkins, not wanting to further inconvenience the family who had taken her in, continued on her route. The men returned roughly half an hour later; one held her while the other stabbed her. The killing, in a town with a longstanding reputation as a “sundown town,” went unsolved for more than three decades. In 2002, an anonymous letter to police named Kenneth Clay Richmond as the killer; his daughter, seven years old at the time of the murder, confirmed she had witnessed her father stab Jenkins from the back seat of the family car while a second, still-unidentified man held her down, and that her father had paid her seven dollars never to speak of it. Richmond was arrested and charged with murder in 2002, but was found incompetent to stand trial due to cognitive decline; he died of cancer later that year, maintaining his innocence to the end. The second man was never identified.

Martinsville, IN · Morgan County

• 1968: Case opens — victim reported missing or found.
• Documented milestones (renewed investigation, media coverage, family advocacy) to be added as sourced.
• Present: case remains unresolved. No named suspect has been convicted.

• Victim identity, background, and the September 16, 1968 date and circumstances, per PBS FRONTLINE's “Un(re)solved” case summary.
• Kenneth Clay Richmond was identified in 2002 through his daughter's eyewitness testimony, arrested, and charged with murder, but was found incompetent to stand trial and died later that year before any trial occurred.

• No one was ever convicted in Jenkins's killing.
• The identity of the second man involved in the attack was never established.

• PBS FRONTLINE Un(re)solved — case summary
• African American Registry — case summary
• Project Cold Case
• Murder Accountability Project
• NamUs