Murder of Carol Jenkins

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.