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You are now listening to True Murder The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gaesy, Bundy, Dahmer, The Night Stalker, DTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Good evening. In Murder in a Sundown Town, author Alexandra Kitty looks at the shocking nineteen sixty eight homicide of Carol Jenkins, a sweet and resilient twenty one year old woman stabbed in the heart on her first day on the job selling encyclopedias in Martinsville. In what seemed to be an easily solved homicide turned into a four decade cold case and became a tragic story about racism, sexism, gossip,
and walls of silence. It is a case of injustice and persistence that still leaves as many questions as answers. In an age of both true crime fascination, and modern social politics holding equal attention. This book looks at an old case in a contemporary light, from the clues to its racial and gender politics, investigation, resolution, and cultural impact. The book takes an in depth look at a young woman's frightening last hours and why Carol's case is as
relevant today as it was in the sixties. The book that we're featuring this evening is Murder in a Sundown Town with my special guest, journalist and author Alexandra Kitty. Welcome to the program, and thank you very much for this interview. Alexandra Kitty, thank.
You so much for having me Dan, it's great.
To be Thank you so much.
Well.
First off, you talk about in the introduction about your previous books that you've written and that this book is a significant departure for you. You usually write about journalism. But tell us about what happened in May twenty twenty two this opportunity that came to you.
Well, I was looking for a teaching job at college or a university, because that's what that's my other passion is not just writing books, but teaching and researching. And I just came across this looking for a researcher for a true crime documentary program. Now, I grew up watching true crime, I read true crime books, and I thought, well, okay, I put my resume and they're not going to call me back for an interview, but I'm going to try. They called me back, they said sure, And I didn't
have a true crime background. I did write a couple of true crime stories as a journalist, two or three, and I said, sure, I'd love to be a researcher. It's not on camera, and I love reading. I love researching. So I said okay. They said ten weeks, and I said, okay, I'll do ten weeks, and then they kept expanding my contract. So I went through the whole season of seven months, and I did eight stories that made it to air.
And I really found this fascinating because when you watch it as a viewer, you don't see the tells, you don't see the fit, the process, how you go because it's a lot of work. You're putting out basically a huge book a week on television, although so little goes into it that you see. There's so much of the facts you have to dig out when they do re enactments, what the victim wore on the same the night they
were killed. That's what the actor who's playing this person is going to weark the details you have to dig up as a researcher in worms, you have tons of things you have to find. They might be subtleties on the screen. And I said, this is absolutely a most This was one of the best jobs I ever had, and I still say it. It was such a learning experience for me and how true crime of television is put together and people don't give it enough credit. This
is grueling one. You're constantly looking for information anywhere you can find it, from an inmate search online to what do's the inside of the house that was the victims killed look like? Everything? Obituaries, news articles, court transcripts, police files, interviews.
You're putting so much into a single episode. I thought this is something that I want to explore more, but as an author, so once I did that, this is probably there's one of the most eye opening experiences of my life and one of the most best jobs I ever had, because I learned so much on this job that I kind of took on a lark.
Now you talk about this book, It's about the short life and tragic death of Carol Jenkins tell us what it includes, and you talk about resolution and a term you call the echoes.
It's an interesting and heartbreaking case. A young twenty one year old African American woman named Cheryl Marie Jenkins, and who was I would describe as in every woman. She was close to her family, she had a job, she was well lived in her community, she had a lot of friends, and she was resilient and she was as low risk of a victim as you could be. And yet she was killed in right in the middle of a street in a small town where you know, everybody
knows everybody, and everybody's there. And yet what should have been an open and shutcase was left a cold case for decades, and nobody would forget about Carol. I mean, the echoes were here. What happened, the tragedy and the injustice that happened to kill this case would be you know, people would scream, it would be reopened every few years, nothing would come out of it. It would be called again,
people would demand justice, it would get reopened. And so this was a dance for decades and it didn't seem like this would ever be a closed case. And you know, miraculously there was more of a resolution than what would have been because this was just one of those tragedies for people demanded answers and they weren't getting any, but people weren't going away, and people kept demanding and demanding. I mean, even you know, national Press more than once
took up the mantle. So well, why don't we have a suspect in custody? I mean, this case was shocking in so many different ways. You know, here's a young woman walking down the street doing her job and literally died of a broken heart because that's how the killer got to them.
Let's get to this tragic story. You take us to Rushville, Indiana. You say population sixty two hundred and the proportion of black people is one point five eight percent. Take us back to nineteen sixty eight and Carol Jenkins a little bit about her background and how she found herself working for PF. Callier and Son on the streets trying to sell encyclopedias.
So Carol was very, very attractive, a twenty one year old factory worker from Philcal Factors, and she was the eldest. Her mother had remarried and her half siblings all adored her. Her stepfather, a daughter or mother a daughter. She had many, many friends, but she found herself out of work like many people during a strike at Felco. So she didn't have you know, she needed to pay her bills just like everybody else. So her friend Paula Bradley, well, why
don't we sell encyclopedias door to door? That was, you know, a job they could do. So the two of them signed up to do sell encyclopedias, which was something that was not in Carol's background. She wasn't a saleswoman. She was a factory worker, but that didn't need deter her. So she went with her friend and two other supervisors for them. The supervisors were white males, her friend Paula
was black. She was black, and then they decided to so she was doing her training and then this was her first night on the job, so they were running late. They were supposed to go to another town a little further away where they were doing economically better than Martinsville, but since they were running out of time and there was a bad weather, they decided they would go to Martinsville,
which was closer. They weren't as well healed choice number one, but this was good enough, so that's where they went that night. They went to Martinsville and they score them split up, so each sort of took a quadrant and they went door to door selling encyclopedias, and paul went one way and Carol went another way. Paula was rrass. Something happened to Carol and she ran for help and things just went squirl downhill from there.
Let's go back because Carol talks to her stepfather earlier in the evening. There is when they split up and they go into the neighborhoods, it's not yet dark. You say that sundown was seven point fifty one. And before we go on, let's talk about just briefly, what the term for people that don't know what a sundown town is.
A sund downtown is something that's unspoken but very well known. It is small towns which it's very dangerous for African Americans to go after sundown because there's racist elements. There's racist actors who have no qualms about inflicting harm or even killing somebody if there's somebody who's black that comes after the sun goes down. So that's where the term sundown town comes from.
Now you say that she was proceeding in selling her encsychopedias, going door to door, and you mentioned that Martinsville, unlike Rushville, has a black percentage population of almost zero. Right, she was going door to door. And where we find the first record of anything happening in contact with police and Carol Jenkins was when she came to the home of the Neils, and that would be Don Neil and Norman Neil. And you say that don Neil was nineteen year old,
nineteen year old man and with his wife Norma. What does Carol say to them in this first encounter with.
Them, Well, she knocked on the door and she said there were a couple of people in a car haussling with her. So the Neils went to help. Now I'm going to just back chuck a little. She was already worried about going to Martinsville because her stepfather warned her that this was not a good time to be Her stepfather was very well high school basketball player who had
problems in Martinsville. So she was already kind of on ed when she went to Martin's and then there were some a couple of young men in a car who were hassling her, and she felt threatened enough that she went to the Nails, knocked on their door and was looking for help. Basically that there were these people in a car and a dark car that were hastling her and she was looking for salvation. So the Nails took her in so they went to look. They called the
police and they invited her to stay. They were also very worried about her well being that night.
What did police have to say?
You say that.
There was a police officer that responded, what did he say to Carol and to the nails, Well.
He said he investigated, he looked around. There was nothing to see here. It was the bottom line, and they took a patrol car. They looked around and didn't see anything, or said they didn't see anything, so they kind of brushed it off. They weren't that serious about Carol's inserts and the Nails were enough where they offered her to stay for supper, and she turned them down because she
said she didn't want to be a bother. So she was a very polite young woman who said, who turned down this because usually when you're at that age, you don't want to be a bother to strangers who already went over and beyond. They called the police they went out looking and they made overtures. So they were very very nice young couple, and they tried to help her, and she felt like she was, you know, probably overstaying her welcome and that she should go and probably that
was nothing. So she kind of grabbed their bearings and said, no, it's okay, I'll go in them.
They had also drove her around trying to look for the rest of her group, or more importantly, one of her supervisors, didn't they.
Yes, and they didn't find either, So don drove her around. They couldn't find anyone from her original group. They didn't see anybody that fit the description, and instead of getting police to kind of escort her, which they didn't do, she was left on her own.
After that, there was a second to explain to our audience, there was a second time that an officer arrived and offered her a ride to meet her friends.
And she turned it down.
He turned it down. Yes, So she.
Was about fifteen blocks away from the Neil residence and it's you right, maybe within thirty minutes there's a torrential downpour of rain. Tell us what the Neils, if I believe, if I'm correct, had given her to help her in this rain.
Well, it wasn't the Nils. It was another woman who was in the neighborhood who was worried about Carol because it was raining, who gave her a scarf. So and she told the media, well, I gave her a scarf, So Carol did have something to kind of protect her hair by means of a scarf. So this is all that Carol had. There was rain coming down. I mean, this was probably, you know, one of the worst first
days on the job. You're out new job, you're trying to go out, it's rating, you're already scared because somebody has made threats to you, and somebody saw her being very pleasant. Everybody who the police interviewed, who she went door to door said she was unbelievably outgoing, unbelievably pleasant. So she was keeping a game face, and she got
a scarf. And that scarf would prove to be a central element of the case, but at the time, it was just something to help Carol not get totally soaking wet.
On her way. On her walk, there's a service station owned by Keith Ford and just when she gets past that, witnesses hear a scream tell us about this.
Well, they could account for all of her movements. They knew where she was going pretty much by interviewing everybody. And then at one point there's a scream and somebody had his window open even though it was raining, and he heard the screen and he looked out the window and he saw this girl staggering, and he ran out. He didn't have a telephone, but he went to a restaurant across the street to call police because this young woman.
All of a sudden, there was a bleeding young woman in the middle of the sidewalk and that was Carol. So from being worried then and in the middle of the rain, yes, which you think, you know that it would be safe even there, who'd want to go out, But you know, she was obviously targeted. And they took advantage the torrential rain where there'd be less likely people to see, be able to see, or even be out, and they took that advantage and they killed her.
Now there's witnesses, and so you say, by the time the paramedics arrived, her injuries are so severe she succumbs to her injuries.
Her literally her heart was ripped. This is how severe the injury was. I mean she didn't have a prayer. This is somebody who just went with her with such overkill, such violence. By the time the paramedics came there, there was no helping. This was a very quick and brutal homicide. Somebody rabbed her and just thrust an instrument into her chest, ripped her heart, and she had an injury on her chin, and she had her chest injuries on her chest, so
this was no defensive wounds. She didn't have time to fight back or do anything. She was completely completely incapacitated, and as I said before, she was worried and nervous that her and Paula wanted to buy some sort of self defense weapon that they never got a chance to because they didn't have time. If that would have helped her or not, it's timely doubtful because this everything happened so quickly.
You're right that initially when police arrived, they realized that she has not been molested or robbed, and they surmised that her attacker laid in wait, they thought behind a couple of big evergreen bushes. But meanwhile, you tell us you write about how the police respond initially in terms of gathering evidence, and that it would be up to the Indiana State Police to begin the investigation, and much of the forensic evidence would no longer be available as it was heavily raining.
It was heavily raining, and bystanders were picking up evidence. They found her notebook, They found a whole bunch of things and without gloves. You have to realize they all the evidence was kept compromise, not just because of the rain, because the police didn't courting off anything. People were coming up to the police. Here's her notebook, here's her briefcase, here's her fold I mean, when you think about this, even the killer could have come up and given it
and then accounted for the frame of Prince. We don't know. This is how badly the scene was contaminating. So you have the rain working against you. There's no time nobody's trying to cover anything. You have people walking off the street and giving the things, and you have to take it for granted that that was something that Carol had or was it the killer. We don't know. Nothing was left where it was supposed to be. So the police had absolutely and this was a town they didn't have homicides.
I have to add, they didn't have a big experience dealing with murder. So you have people are police who don't have the experience dealing with murder. You have the weather working against you, you have bystanders contaminating this crime scene. So right off the bats, we're now down to zero in this case. That should have been at least somehow preserved, but nobody preserved anything. And that's DNA that might have been there could have been lost and was lost. Everything
was lost. This is how horrible a crimecy management was at the time.
But police are hopeful because this Dawn Neil had the presence of mind to take down the license plate number. What happens with this license plate number.
Well, she got something off on the my license plate number, so it wasn't easy fined. And so they did eventually find the car and a car without a similar license plate, and they said this guy didn't have anything to do with the crime. So what was a potentially promising lead did not end up being a laite. So this was one of those things where they didn't have as much as they should have had.
You write about September eighteenth, nineteen sixty eight, a funeral service was held for Carol in Rushville and mourners and the curious and the disbelieving came all filing past the casket. But at that time, soon after police had no suspects tell us about the treatment from the Neils.
Surprisingly, the Nils Doniel has passed on, but through the decades they maintained what they've maintained. It always been consistent. But they've also also been abused. They had they weren't hiding for a bit because of the threats that because they helped care. So here are two witnesses, the best witnesses the police have, who are being threatened and abused and told to keep wuyet. So there's now something that pops out. Your witnesses who are more than willing to help.
They were trying to help her on the night she was killed. They were more than helpful to the police. And yet now all of a sudden they are being silenced because they're being threatened with their their lives are being threatened. This was this was a very serious turn of events that they didn't get protection. So this was something else. This was another avenue, you know, that could
have been completely closed. They did their best, but they were threatened, and you don't expect witnesses to be threatened like this in the town, so you know, people told them to keep quiet.
How did police respond in terms of the media, what did they order and why?
Well, that was also sort of messy because the coroner gave an impromptu press conference telling people more than he should have, so there wasn't as much in terms of holdback, so they told him to be quiet. They were not. The police were very happy with outside media. So you're dealing with local media and you know the people and you can present information because those are people you know.
But then you had people from larger newspapers coming in asking hard questions that the police didn't couldn't handle, and they didn't like. So there was also a media shut out through this case because a lot of the big pieces of information that came out of this came from the big city daily, so they were actually quite helpful
in finding information. It didn't seem to go anywhere. So there were people who rightfully outraged by this case, such as people in the press outside of Martinsville who they kept getting shoot away the LOLd and stymy so eventually and they kind of fell silent. So this was very much one another out of you that you know, a lot of times you take things to the press. Somebody knows something and they come forward. But here big city papers tried to help and they were turned away.
You talk about, of course, nineteen sixty eight and the lack of forensic evidence technology and techniques, but there is the nineteen sixty five Mercury comet and the idea that police would utilize polygraph testing. So tell us about the suspects that were reported harassing Carol Jenkins that night in the sixty five Mercury comment. How did police deal with those suspects.
Well, everybody got a pretty much polygraph. And what was interesting, polygraphs cannot actually prove guilt or innocence, and yet the police were treating it as if this was well, okay, he passed the polygraph. So we don't know if the person was prepped for the polygraph, if they knew the questions ahead of time. Sometimes people who are psychopaths are very good at passing them because they don't have anxiety overlying, so they would say, okay, we give so and so
a polygraph. He's clear, he's clear. We talked to them. They were clear. They were throwing the polygraph. They weren't saying Okay, we established an alibi, we talked to it. It was a very uncomfortable way of clearing people was okay, we have the polygraph and that's key passed, so we don't have to go back. And this would be a sticking point later on because when people were you know, and they would reopen the cases that that polygraph it wasn't what they were using to try to find more
information from these people. So a lot of things were fought lost even through just over reliance on a polygraph.
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Now, also the reporting and also from the gathers from your writing from the police chief that the way this murder was being depicted was not as a racially motivated murder at all. How did they try to depict this murder.
That's very interesting one I'm finding. But they always took that off the table. This was not a racist base murder. This was not a racist based murder. We're not a sundown town. Although even in their own media newspaper they were talking about Talah asking a group of African American book salespeople who were coming in town, well it's sundown, you shouldn't come. So obviously there was a lot there.
Wow.
But what they did then, well, it was probably what they was, and I'm using a quote here as sexteen. This was probably a sex based murder because Carol was beautiful, she was attractive, so obviously it had to be a gender based thomicide, as if that was somehow a less offense. So it was. They had a theory that was because Carol was pretty. Somebody I talked to her because she was pretty. Nobody became almost an affront when you were saying, well,
maybe it was because she was black. Oh no, no, no, it was because she was speen and she was beautiful. So that's what it had to be. That was the narrative that you heard from decades from people who were in denial about that it could possibly be a eight base based on racism.
For example, the investigation as well, you write about the two suspects in the sixty five comment opposed to Carol Jenkins' claims when she called police at the NILS. What did they say in response to those claims of Carol Jenkins.
Well, they denied that they killed her. Obviously, they did say that they might have called or whistled, so it was well, yeah, we gave her undue attention, but it was sort of the well aren't you attractive kind of attention and a lot of you know, people were talking about gossiping and the town and then sometimes you don't you know, people said well I might have had something to do with it, or they said something, you know,
they were taking credit for the crime. The police would come, they would do their investigation, and it was always inconclusive one way or another. So the suspects had good reason to be suspects. It just accept you didn't have any forensic evidence and establishing time. Whines at the beginning was not you know, it didn't seem to be a priority because I think the police decided write down and there that it was. They were going to say it was sexually a base assault that didn't go all the way
and they just killed it. So there was there's a lot of markiness in this case because things were not That's why the state police were eventually brought in, because it was just any possible potential lead somehow got muddied within the investigation itself. As I go through my book, what should have been and what was two totally different things.
How does James R. Smith come to the attention of police and why?
Well, basically you have people who such as Sam, who were taking claim You would get drunk or they would say something and then people would tell the police. The police would come and they would deny it. And we're talking about a bunch of suspects. As I said, they had every reason to be suspects. They said things to other people. There were people in town who went to police thing so and so said this. There was one woman who says she knew things. They went to her
and then she was just bragging. So this time, even the police, she finally said to people, please stop gossip, please stop telling stories, because this, you know, this is already a mess. So what we know about the case a lot of times, and even with our suspects such as Smith, it basically was gossip from people, people talking, people bribing, and it really was going in circles. This is to me what struck me was how much information
came from just curious gossip. I mean, when I did true crime television, I noticed that there would be always a degree of people coming in with gossip. But I don't think I've ever seen any case where the amount of information that comes from gossip came the way from the Carol Jenkins case. I mean, it was almost you know, for one homicide to have that many people tell stories one way or another. It may or may not have been true or had elements of truth, but this was to me quite striking.
Let's talk about another suspect, Keith Ford, and why he's a suspect. And also you mentioned about hold back evidence, which is a technique police will do to ferret out the truth later. With that hold back evidence, as if that suspect knows that evidence obviously they can conclude they are the perpetrator, tell us about the screwdriver and hold back, and Keith Ford as a suspect.
What was supposed to be a holdback was the murder weapon, and she was corner pretty much figured out it had to be something like a screwdriver because it wasn't a nuts, and this was considered a holdback, except people were gossiping abound town and that within i think within a few months, was already well known, so that police's hold back, which would have been the murder weapon normally came out. So that ended up not being very helpful because you had,
you know, she was near mechanics. She died near you know, an not a mechanic shop, so they figured, okay, the suspect works with tools and it had to might have been him. So that was one another thing that was because the corner and other people kind of talked about the case when they shouldn't have. That did not turn out to be a holdback. The only thing that was a partial holdback was the scarf she was wearing, although in the media they did mention it was a single
reference about her getting a scarf. The only thing was that the color of the scarf was never mentioned anywhere. That was actually the only true holdback we had in this entire case, because everything kind of came out because people were constant somebody would find out something, they would tell everybody else in town. No longer became a holdback. So a screwdriver should have been the hole back didn't
end up being a holdback. So you know, that became problematic too, because every time, as I said, the police said to people stop gossiping, but once things came out, they became muddy. Then you don't know if that's just because it was accidentally muddied or was that by design. Where if people know everything, then how do you investigate?
You write about the sensational conjecture, but you also talk about that Joseph W. Summer, the treasurer of the NAACP in Indianapolis Chapter, he was calling for action. He sent a telegram to Ramsey Clark, then the Attorney General, imploring the DOJ to open an investigation into Carroll's murder and tell us also that they mentioned that KKK had been active in the area as well and part of the history of Morgan County.
Kkking had a rally in Martinsville not long before the murder of Carroll. So the people who did not feel safe Black people in that area just did not feel safe in Martinsville because the KKK went there. Town denied that anything, but you still had a rally in there. There was no doubt about it that there was an attraction. So the NAACP was kind of getting fed up. They're saying, you know, this should have been an open and shut murder.
We want action them, So they asked Ramsey Clark. They asked for it to be opened and didn't get open, which it should happen because after this this was bungled and bungled and bungled. And what was an interesting offshoot, there was no murders in Martinsville in that area at all before Carol's murder. After people saw that they could get away with it, there was a bunch of unsolved homicides as a result. So you have here the NAACP clamoring for a justice that's been denied and they're getting
stille the walled. You're now starting to see an increase in homicides in this area because you know, people can figure okay, I can I can get away with this, So this speaking, Martinsville had a horrible reputation. They were they were deemed a sundowntown. So you did not have people coming to this town, not just you know, the black community, about other people who were for civil rights
and civility saying well, we're not coming here. And Smartsho suffered economically, they suffered in terms of safety, and their reputation was basically ruined because this homicide was just left hanging.
And you're write that no case in Martinville's history had used so much and so many resources. Let's use this as an opportunity to stop to hear from our sponsor. Have you ever been so bloated that you just had to cancel out on a party that you were invited to? You would have had to wear your sweatpants, it was so bad. Well, Ritual literally created their Symbiotic Plus with
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more shame in your gut game. That's why Ritual is offering my listeners thirty percent off during your first month. Visit ritual dot com slash murder to start Ritual or add Symbolic Plus to your subscription today. Now you talk about throughout this book when we hadn't mentioned, is that you refer to the process of writing or movies and television and the difference when you're talking about a book and the research involved and just the differences between them.
But you also talk and mention about the Injustice Files in twenty fourteen, tell us about the Injustice Files and what it revealed and what it didn't reveal about Carol's murder.
Well, the Injustice Files. Carol was one of three cases in this episode. So this was the first time that we had a true crime show featuring Carol Jenkins. And they interviewed her family and they interviewed the Neils, and well, the Nils didn't realize why they were being interviewed. They thought they were giving an interview just about Carol, and it opened up at Carroll words for them. They were
quite deterred by the interview how it was presented. You know, they were trying to find out who was the other person or who was the person that they killed Carol, and they interviewed somebody. They didn't give very much information, So there was not a lot of information in this. So you could tell when you work in true crime, on the other side of the camera, you see tells, So you saw that there wasn't a lot of pictures of Carol. There was no interviews with any lead detectives.
You've seen that they were shut out, so you see that they didn't have a lot of information to go on. They had to use other means to tell the story. That's why it wasn't just about Carol. There was two
other homicides that this episode was featured. Even then, when you're doing a true crimes episode, you need a lot more information than most people realize, and you just because of the way things were handled and investigated, you couldn't actually do a whole episode on Carol, though you technically could. But when you don't have a lot of information, when sources are not forthcoming the things you have to make
up those deficits. And you could see that this was somebody who really wanted to talk about Carol, but didn't have a lot of cards to play about it. So this episode, the people who were, let's say, wanted Carol's murder avenged properly. I did not feel like that that's happened. The Neils were not happy with the outcome of that interview at all.
You fast forward to the year two thousand and you say by two thousand the case would be reopened and the narrative would begin to shift, finally entertaining the possibility that race was the primary motive for the homicide.
Tell Us about this shift, Well, when you were listening to the police, when you were listening to the local press, there it was never about race. This was like, oh, could not possibly be about race. And that's why that thing was moving because when you have a certain lens, you filter out everything else. So a lot of clues over the decades were ignored or lost because it wasn't it didn't fit the narrative. Well, this was a sex attempt,
not a race attempt. So once it started entertaining the possibility that this was a racist or supremacist that was responsible for Carol's homicide, that's when things started to shift. So we moved away from well, this was a sex base to talk to, this was a hate crime based in race. But that's what actually we started to see progress in this case because now we've opened up the filter to allow for information that could have been previously ignored for that reason. So all of a sudden, Carol's
case was open and it wasn't cold anymore. And within you know, a couple of years after that, we've seen it at the breakthrough. So it was once we started saying, yes, this was but even people in Martinsville, you know, we're digging their sills. No, it wasn't racism. It wasn't racism, But more and more people were clamoring. You had New Yorker do an article, a very very thorough article on
the case. They said it had to be racism based on everything we know, and anybody who looks at this, you know, even half Garden and you will say this was a racist attack because the same night that Carrol was killed, Paula, who was in a different part of town, was being harassed. Now, the two people and that four sun that wasn't harassed were the two white males. So that told you, you know, we're talking about it wasn't safe for a black person to be in this town at Sanda right, you're.
Right about Indiana State Police detectives am I all Chron and Alan McElroy, and they reinvestigated this murder for eleven months, you say, into the second year, and they created a cold case team to solve this unsolved murder. And you talk about the break that they eventually get right in the midst of this reopening of this over thirty eight year or thirty seven year cold case.
So yes, they reinterviewed everybody they could who was still alive. They ever they had in terms of evidence. They actually sent for DNA testing hoping that something would come. But then they had somebody, a woman. I'll say, I know who did it because I witnessed it and it was
my father. So all of a sudden from being cold case to somebody finally coming forward saying, yes, I witnessed that murder my father and somebody else I don't know who, because the girl was only seven years old at the time. Her name was McQueen, and she said, my father, Kenneth Richmond, was the killer. So all of a sudden from not having anything to having a witness and she was I remember because Carol was wearing a yellow scarf that night, so we knew that that was the color of the scarf.
It wasn't even just the scarf, because there was a single reference. I went through every media outlet that covered it during the time, and only one person interview the woman who gave her the scarf, and she didn't say what color was it was raising or gave her a scarf and nobody knew was the one thing that only hold back they actually had was the color of the scarf. And this woman remembered the color of the scarf.
Shirley McQueen. You right, though she did not just one day pick up the phone and call police. There was over the years, and she had told other people, so explain this process that eventually she was spoke to police.
Well, she told her former sister in law. She did tell people over the years, and she was too scared of her father. Her father I had criminal record. He never seemed to be convicted of anything. So it was accused of homicide before, so let's not out. And he had roots to white supremacy, so he was not a safe fellow to disobey. We'll put it to you this and so she told people and she so eventually her sister in law said something, went to the press, to
a television station. Eventually Carol's stepfather pied a private investigator who was a former state trooper. He managed to find her. So all of a sudden, from multiple angles, this sort of kind of broke open because I guess she told more than one person, and it started to come out to some people in the press. Got a hold of this. A private investigator bottle hold of this, so finally, after
so many decades, it migrated to the police. So she was very reluctant to tell the police, but she told other people, and those other people started putting feelers to police, to the press. And that's how it finally when she got the courage to go to the police directly and say, yes, I'll testify, you say.
By May two thousand and two, it's finally revealed the name Kenneth Clay Richmond. You write in this book about his psychiatric background. Tell us a little bit about Kenneth Clay Richmond.
He, as I said, was a very dangerous fellow. He was accused of killing his friend. He castrated himself. He was not somebody who fooled around with had He wasn't a psychiatric hospital. So he was somebody who we would say was ultra violent. He was not stable, and but he seemed to beget He seemed also to be just as much charmed. Whenever he was up against something, he seemed to skirt the consequences of his actions. So Carol's murder was not the first one that would have he
would have gotten away. There was always some sort of technicality or something, and he was never really held accountable for his previous violent actions.
You say that he had other offenses even you say he was abusive to his wife and kids as Ruby Walsh even stabbed her, and he had an offensive stabbing a police officer as well. And it was well known that he hated blacks. That was something that everybody knew. It came from his mouth.
Exactly, everybody knew. I mean, he was open. This wasn't some sort of secret double neither his violence nor his hatred of people who were not like him as a secret. He was very open and very proud. So this is, you know, somebody you would not want to have anything to do with. He was dangerous, but he was free to rome and there were a lot of casualties. I mean, he was abusive to his wife, he was abusive to
his children, He was abusive to his whole circle. He was not somebody I mean, I mean, damnage she did to himself. So you know that what are you going to do to somebody like this who can do things to his own body without flinching.
This has found out a little bit later. But you write that what his daughter claimed, surely claimed happened? You write in detail what she said her father did and.
Said, well, he grabbed her, his companion grabbed her. He stabbed her, and he threatened his daughter. He gave her seven dollars to keep quired because she was seven years old, so give her a dollar for every year she was alive. So he said, keep this to yourself, don't tell anybody. So for years she was scared. She didn't tell anybody for years because she was scared out of her I mean, if your father can take a perfect stranger off the street and ran as screwdriver, and which he had, he
was that was his profession. He had made perfect sense for him to have a screwdriver, so he was good for it. But she was too scared to say anything to anybody for years she was an adult when she's finally was able to say, yes, my father did it because she was scared of him, and she had very little recourse because he had no inhibitions. He was a psychopatht he did stuff that would horrify most people, and
yet he could do it no problem. And here's a little girl who asked to carry this burden on her terrified, Well, what if her father changes his mind and gets rid of her just to keep a witness quiet.
You're right about I say the seven dollars reward to keep her mouth shut, but also that the two perpetrators were laughing when they returned to the car and said that she had it coming to her. She got what she deserved.
He was heartless. I mean, this was something I mean to laugh. You're killing that perfect stranger who's never done you any harm, was not doing anything, just working. She was working. Carol was working at a job and was just terrorized and then murdered in cold block, right on them outside, right in the open. I mean, you think, okay, you're in a small town, it's raining, you don't think anybody's going to bother you, and here are these people coming,
and then they lack. I mean, your family is going to be destroyed for the rest of their lives. These people are laughing. And this young girl, this is what she was exposed to. She was exposed to somebody a very impressionable age. Well, it's funny to kill somebody. So, you know, kudos to her to her not losing her moral core over this horrific, horrific turn of events.
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You also write that just to lay some credence to your notion, that assertion that Carol would be afraid of her father. In nineteen eighty five, years after Carol Jenkins's murder, he killed his friend Samuel Leverett. But he wasn't convicted of shooting as a friend. All he was convicted of
was the illegal possession of firearms. And you say, really, what happened was in the court case they had difficulty convicting of a manslaughter and that that war, the manslaughter wasn't an option available to them, and so that's how he ended up with the legal possession of firearms and only a short four year sentence for murder.
Well, she kept getting away with things. I mean, there was always some sort of dark charm with him. He would get away with things, so that you know, that right to play in Shirley McQueen's mind. My father gets away with the chilling people. So she's seen him with what he did to Carol, She's seen him wark so it was not an easy thing for her, a burden to carry, and so she carried it as she did
confide in certain people. But eventually, something like this eventually is going to end up in the direction of the police. And that's when things started to change. In this case.
You talk about his arrest and now, unlike in the beginning of nineteen sixty eight, it makes national headlines, but there still was no information as to his accomplice.
Was there and still isn't. It's actually still an open case. The FBI still is looking for the second accomplice. Whether he's dead or life, we don't know, but most likely he's not. But it is that we only know half the story. We don't know who the accomplice was because Shirley was too young. You know, where they dropped off the accomplice, what was his name, who he was in relation to her fault. So we don't know everything about Carol's murder. We just have one half of this from
the one who was the instigator. So he was the main instigator of the homicide. It was on his order and say so because he's the one that stabbed her. The other accomplice just held her down to be stat So we're still not entirely clear about who was the other killer. We just know there is another one.
Now right away, there is a need to take this guy to trial. And so right away, you say, right from the very beginning of this trial, it's a battle. And so there are battles for such things as the psychiatric records of both people, Shirley and her father. And of course the defense lawyer named Litz is putting on a is a very aggressive and vigorous defense tell us in this battle.
Before what happened was that this lets his lawyer, Richmond's lawyer, was very very good at being a defense lawyer. He wanted the daughter's Society chiatric file, which we could say it could have been in a form of intimidation. She would of course have psychological problems if she's witnessed a murder. She's going to have problems being with an abusive family
and being scared out of your mind, espec. She if your father killed before and got away with it, and this were every way he went, He goes, well, I'm going to show what's really happening. He didn't do it. He was quite hockey. And what happened was his client eventually got very old, very sick, and passed away before he would go to trip, so he actually managed to keep him out of They couldn't even have a trial
at the end because the prime suspect expired. It had cancer, he was sick, he was old, and so the family
didn't even get to see what evidence they had. They didn't even manage to present the case in a court of law, so this was also something they not so we basically we never got to see the full case from the police over the decades, because they reopened this case quite a few times, probably once a decade at least, they tried to open this case and nothing happened, and then again, we don't even know who the second person could have been, so what would have been put in trial,
what evidence, other evidence would have been very interesting to know. The national media, even international media, this caught the attention of a lot of different places. People wanted to know and they never got it. It was he just died, and he died never being convicted of the murder.
You write about what happens after what this trial represented, but also the aftermath tell us about what is concluded after this, and certainly there was no conviction. What was concluded after this? What was said in the media tell us.
Well, basically they said it's pretty much the people believe that it was Kenneth Clay, which meant there were circumstantial evidence. There was the testimony of his daughter, There was hold back of the scarf, his views. He went that way, this route was not unfamiliar to him. And there was a park erected in Carol's honor. There was a plaque in Martinsville, which the Neils really fought to fight Tuday
Nail to get a plaque in her honor. Even the town the city hall did not want to give a ploque to Caro, so it was a battle, and at that point doan Neil was dying of cancer. Because I want to see this before I died, This young woman taunts me to this day. Well, we will never forget Carol Jenkins. So he and his wife Norma never forgot.
At the ceremony, Paula, who was the young woman who talked Carol into going for this job, who was there on the night she was murdered, came to the ceremony and she was she never stepped for the Martinsville since the murder, so she was this took all her courage to come to this ceremony. So we know some of the case. It's not fully close case because we know that there's another person potentially and we know nothing about
it and may never know. We may never know the full story of Carol, but she seemed to have been after the murder, she almost was forgotten. And yet this is still an open case. Yet we still have somebody else we could find and just kind of vanished after a while. And it's a shame because this is something that we should really remember. This is something you know, how many young people go on the first day at
work and then get get killed. So viciously, which she she just was walking down the streets picking herself up after having being shut out from her previous job in a factory. So this was a very hard working young woman and her friends were always devastated. There was one young girl who wrote paid for a newspaper at a
memorial for Carol a year after she died. And a lot of times this case would have even been never looked at, but her family go and put ads in the moral to Carol every year she got, hoping that that would regent force people to reopen the case, pressure the police to open the case. So in the spirit of that Carol we know as a victim of a hate part and that off it was one of the most important gate based homicides in the United States, and it doesn't get the attention it deserves.
It's a shameful chapter that you write about in Martinsville and the area. But also that seems that the state police were the only people investigating, and it seemed like the local police chief and the local police had many reasons to not investigate as fully as they may have they There were, of.
Course rumors why they did. Of course there were counter rumors and all sorts of things. But if it wasn't for the Indiana State Police, I don't think this would have ever been even resolved that much. They came They had two very good cold case detectives who came in and said, Okay, we're going to take another crack at this. They did other cold cases, so they were well trained and they were serious, and they didn't look through leads.
They retested things, they reinterviewed people. And it wasn't until Shirley McQueen came forward and said I know who did it that, and they found her credible that I actually mentioned. They had other evidence and everything else, but she they believed her enough that they would charge her father. They didn't have to if they didn't believe her. So they must have been an awful lot that they had to debate, do we arrest this man or not? Do we do
this or not? How strong is her testimony? She was willing to testify even though her father's lawyer was threatening to up demand that cherish psychiatric information being made public. He could look at it and make powers. So she was a very brave woman. This could not have been easy for.
You write in the end that Carol's story is far from over. And I would agree with you and say that, especially with this book, her story and the lessons from her story very much will stay alive.
She said, I said, a very important figure. She was a very modest young woman and you know, hardworking she was. You know, she would have been anybody's dream daughter. She would have been anybody's dream employee and our friend or a family member. And she was just taken. She was just swallowed up in the nut. And we have to remember care. She did everything right. She did everything right. You know a lot of times people go, what did
the victim do well? She was artworking, self sufficient, resilience, and you know, that's who she was, and if we were too honor, that's how we should be treating other cold cases. Resilient, persistent, at not forget. So I really wanted to write this precisely because because I thought, we don't really discuss this case, and this is yet such
a historically important case. And my experience writing true crime shows that this would have been absolutely perfect on one hand for her story to be told in this format, and you hat there were so many obstacles and did it defy those telling in this format because things were botched. There was a lot of rumor and gossip. Things were not clear. You had a talent and constant denial that
they had a racism problem. They took offense to being called a sundown town, even though even in the press you had people, you know, please telling people who are blocked, don't come here at sundown and then say, well, hell, can you call us the sundown town? You know, basic research will tell me that. So that's not something you know. You should be feeling good and safe. It doesn't matter who you are going in any town, doing your job or just going for leisure and come back a lot
and not have to worry about something. She was scared out of her mind going there. She was more scared when people started to harass her. And then her final knowleds work, you know, and all she did was be brave and do her job.
It's also a story about the bravery of Don and Norman Neil and their incredible effort to try to protect Carol Jenkins that night, and also the hard work and persistence and diligence of Carol's family, Elizabeth, her mother, and the family to be able to fight for this case to be reopened. Andvolved.
She had a lot of advocates and a lot of times people fall in the cracks because they don't, so you could imagine you have a whole bunch of kids, the deals or family. You had people fighting for her and it's NAACP, a lot of civil rights activists, and it took decades before her case was resolved.
Absolutely, I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about Murder in a Sundown Town. For those that may want to take a look at other information or your rather books. Do you have a website and do any social media tell us about that.
I have Alexandra Kitty dot com. There's more information about the book, and I'm on Facebook and LinkedIn.
Thank you so much, Alexandra Kitty Murder in a Sundown Town. Thank you so much for this interview, and you have a great evening and good night.