Carol Jenkins arrived in Martinsville, Indiana, on the foggy and damp afternoon of what proved to be nobody in that town’s lucky day. This was September 16, 1968. Although no one in Martinsville was able to get to know her well, thirty-three years later most of its adult population remains familiar with certain vital facts about Carol Jenkins’s brief and abrupt experiences there. She was twenty-one years old, a shy, polite, slender, and pretty woman. As the newspapers in Martinsville and Indianapolis reported at the time, “She was a Negro,” or “a Negro girl.” Growing up in the rural community of Rushville, Indiana, she had nurtured an adolescent fantasy of moving to Chicago and pursuing a career as a fashion model. That dream, however, metamorphosed into the reality of an assembly-line position in a factory that made large appliances. If the factory hadn’t been idled by a strike, she wouldn’t have taken the job that brought her to Martinsville—selling encyclopedias door-to-door. Or, perhaps, had she and her co-workers not got a late start, they might have been able to reach their intended destination of Vincennes, ninety miles farther down the road, and therefore wouldn’t have bothered canvassing in Martinsville—then a working-class town of ten thousand, situated about forty minutes southwest of Indianapolis. Or, had she consulted and heeded her stepfather, Carol Jenkins never would have set foot in Martinsville, in which case she might very well still be alive.
I recall, more than a decade ago, while reporting a story in Indiana, hearing Martinsville mentioned tangentially and being told that it had an all-white population and that black people made a point of not stopping there. That was my first encounter with the legend of Martinsville—the notion that it’s a racist town where no African-American, much less a solitary and attractive African-American woman, would want to be caught after dark. In the years since, Martinsville’s civic burden has, in many respects, worsened. Discussing Martinsville with reporters from other Indiana cities, I’ve found that the conversation never gets very far before references to the Ku Klux Klan creep in. Last August, an Indianapolis Star columnist named Ruth Holladay wrote a couple of stories about Carol Jenkins and described Martinsville as having been, in 1968, “a Ku Klux Klan stronghold.” Seeing the name of their town and those three “K”s in the same context invariably evokes a complex reaction from the town’s loyalists—a mixture of anger, frustration, denial, and weariness, nourished by a suspicion that the rest of the world is inexplicably determined to punish Martinsville for transgressions it had nothing to do with.
Considerable scholarship has been devoted to the history of the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, especially to the nineteen-twenties, when the Klan there was more active than in any other state. In some towns, between forty and fifty per cent of the native-born white men paid the Klan’s ten-dollar membership fee; statewide, the figure averaged almost thirty per cent. In 1923, the city of Kokomo, population thirty thousand, hospitably welcomed a national convention of a hundred thousand Klansmen and their families. The Indiana Klan had a distinct political agenda to go along with its anti-immigrant, anti-black, anti-Catholic dogmatism, and at its peak, after the elections of 1924, it controlled the state Republican Party. Klan-endorsed candidates were elected to the governorship, the majority of both houses of the legislature, and almost all the congressional seats. The steep decline that followed was caused by political corruption and infighting and by the 1925 conviction of Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson on charges of rape and second-degree murder. The last reported racial lynching in Indiana took place in 1930, in the city of Marion.
But in Morgan County, where Martinsville is the county seat, something lingers. On a visit there not long ago, I met with Joanne Raetz Stuttgen, a local resident and a doctoral candidate in folklore at Indiana University. When I asked about the present-day relevance of the Klan, she said, “When I travel and people say to me, ‘Oh, Martinsville. That’s the headquarters of the K.K.K.,’ I tell them, ‘Listen. Martinsville’s so disorganized it couldn’t be the headquarters of anything.’ ” In 1995, a local bank underwrote the publication of a boosterish pictorial history of Martinsville and enlisted Stuttgen to provide the text. She knew better than to duck the issue of race, but she put it off until the very end—a two-page coda entitled “The Legend We Live With,” in which she maintained that, whatever Morgan County’s Klan infatuation might have been seventy years earlier, it amounted to “no more than other Indiana counties.” Martinsville, Stuttgen suggested, was itself a “minority victim: a small, all-white central Indiana town maligned for its supposed racism just as minorities themselves are maligned.” Rather than attempting to pin down how that had come to be, she posed a double-edged rhetorical question: “That Martinsville—or any town—should become the scapegoat for America’s painful sensitivity about its racist and supremacist past is not so unusual. But why Martinsville?”
When Paul Davis married Elizabeth Gooden, in 1949, her daughter, Carol Jenkins, was a toddler. Referring to Carol’s natural father, Davis told me, “She went to see him when she was fifteen or sixteen, but she called me Daddy.” Together, the Davises had five more children, two boys and three girls, and he regarded Carol, no less than the others, as his own. The family resided in Rushville, a classic corn-and-soybeans farming community an hour east of Indianapolis, where Davis has spent his entire life. For forty-eight years, he worked as a machine repairman at a Ford Motor Company plant. Now in his mid-seventies, he lives alone—the Davises divorced in 1967—in an impeccably kept three-bedroom house that he built himself.
As a child in Rushville, where blacks made up about three per cent of the population, Davis attended integrated schools, with no ill consequences. “I never really had any problems,” he said. “Myself, I’ve always been real respected here.” During the forties, when he was in high school, a black friend went to Martinsville to play in a basketball game and reported afterward that he’d been verbally harassed. Martinsville was more than seventy miles away, and Davis had never had reason to visit. But he filed away that information and remembered it two decades later, in the fall of 1967, when a group of Rushville football fans decided to make the trip to watch a game. Davis was reluctant, but his older son, Larry—Carol’s half brother—was Rushville’s star running back, so he went. What he witnessed in Martinsville appalled him. “They called Larry all kinds of names,” he told me. “It wasn’t just the players—it was the fans, too. When he had the ball, there was a lot of ‘Get that nigger!’ Or stuff about ‘that darky.’ And it wasn’t just the kids. Some of those adults was just as bad.” Davis vowed never to return.
Evidently, Carol never got the message. Or it’s possible that she did but felt uncomfortable with the thought of telling her supervisor, on what happened to be her first day of work, that she was afraid to knock on doors in a benign-looking little city. There was, after all, nothing particularly striking about Martinsville, a nineteenth-century settlement that gave the impression of having moseyed indifferently into the twentieth. In the decades since the Depression, a number of enterprises, including the many “health spas,” or sanatoriums, that materialized after the discovery there of artesian wells in the eighteen-eighties, had been dwindling toward extinction. The most conspicuous landmarks were the old sanatoriums, several churches, and a grand red brick Italianate courthouse that occupied the central square.
It was 4:30 p.m. when Carol and the other members of her sales crew—another young black woman from Rushville and two white men from Indianapolis, one of whom was the supervisor—reached Martinsville. They selected a residential area east of downtown—mostly tidy neighborhoods of brick bungalows and two-story wooden frame houses—and split up, agreeing to rendezvous at ten o’clock at a gas station not far from the square. Around seven-thirty, when it had been dark for about a half hour, Carol knocked at the door of a couple named Don and Norma Neal and apologetically explained that she was frightened. Some men in a dark sedan were following her and had yelled at her, she said, though she couldn’t make out what they were saying. When Don Neal went outside, he didn’t see the car she had described, but an unfamiliar light-colored sedan was parked near his house. The car’s parking lights were on, but he couldn’t see the occupants. He approached, and got close enough to make a mental note of the license number. As he returned to the house, the car drove away.
The Neals telephoned the Martinsville Police Department, which dispatched a patrolman, who stuck around for about ten minutes, long enough for Carol to repeat her story. After he departed, Norma Neal drove Carol around the neighborhood for several minutes in an unsuccessful effort to spot one of the other salespeople. Back at the Neals’, Carol turned down their offer to remain with them until it was time to rejoin her colleagues. “We tried to get her to stay. But she said she had been a bother long enough,” Norma Neal told a reporter. “That sounds like her,” Paul Davis reflected, thirty-three years later. “I always felt like she was a very sweet, sort of naïve girl. She had a smile for everybody. She never was in no kind of trouble, never gave me no trouble. Carol didn’t like imposing on anybody.”
At eight, she thanked the Neals and departed. Not quite an hour later, ten blocks away—near the corner of Morgan and Lincoln Streets, a block shy of her destination—she collapsed on the sidewalk. A teen-age boy who lived across the street discovered her and ran into a nearby restaurant to call the police. She was alive when they arrived but dead shortly after an ambulance delivered her to the Morgan County Hospital. Only then was her brown wool jacket removed, and her barely bloodstained white turtleneck sweater, revealing a single stab wound on the left side of her chest. The next day, Paul Davis broke his vow and returned to Martinsville, where he paid a visit to the office of the Morgan County coroner, who had already conducted an autopsy. The killer had punctured her heart.
In the years since, the mystery of how Carol Jenkins died, the whodunit, has competed with the mystery of why the whodunit has never been solved. The official investigation had, at best, an inauspicious beginning. The Martinsville Police Department employed no detective-grade personnel, so the county sheriff and the Indiana State Police were summoned immediately, which turned out to be too late. Not the least complication was that the crime scene had not been secured, mainly because it wasn’t clear that a crime had occurred until Carol was examined at the hospital. Don Kuster, the first state-police detective to work on the case, told me that, when he arrived, “there were about fifty people hanging around the crime scene. One of them came up and handed me a pair of glasses and said, ‘I think these are her glasses.’ Somebody else handed me her notebook.” (The notebook had been lying near the entrance to an auto-repair shop, more than half a block from where she fell.) That it was raining steadily didn’t help matters. The dark-colored automobile that had been trailing her before she sought refuge with the Neals was tracked down. Its teen-age driver and a friend admitted having followed Carol but denied having yelled at her; before long, the police decided they weren’t suspects. Because Don Neal hadn’t accurately remembered the license number of the light-colored sedan, that lead never went anywhere. No murder weapon was ever found.
Out-of-town journalists who came to Martinsville discovered that information was remarkably hard to come by. “The town became a clam,” an Indianapolis newspaper reporter told me. “I got the impression real quickly that there was something funny. I began knocking on doors to see if anyone had seen this gal, and I got nothing from the townspeople. After a while, we learned that nothing was going to happen. And, even if somebody knew something, they were afraid to talk. They really didn’t want outsiders coming around. It cooled and cooled, until it was futile. So we ended up just making routine calls, and when you called you got the standard ‘The investigation is continuing.’ You knew if anything was going to happen it would have to be an anonymous tip. After a while, the thing just petered out.”
Well, not exactly. Six weeks after the murder—by which time there had been an accumulation of news stories bearing headlines like “no promising leads in murder probe” and “clues, motives scarce in martinsville slaying” and “police put ‘lid’ on fatal stabbing case”—the Indianapolis chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sent a telegram to the Attorney General, Ramsey Clark, requesting an investigation by the Department of Justice. The telegram stated that “Morgan County has historically been associated with Ku Klux Klan-like activities.” This was, of course, technically true. And, indeed, the previous year—in the summer of 1967—a Klan motorcade had made a newsworthy tour of several central-Indiana towns which culminated in Martinsville. There, on the courthouse square, thirty or so robed Klansmen carried placards and distributed literature. The Indianapolis Star reported that the group’s spokesman “said Martinsville was chosen for a demonstration because there is a strong local chapter in Morgan County.” (Which is not to say that any of the Klansmen actually lived in Martinsville or that anyone from Martinsville had joined the motorcade.) Whether this episode had any connection to the murder was as much a matter of conjecture as most of the other elements of the case. The federal government never undertook a formal investigation, but the N.A.A.C.P. request helped plant in the minds of people—especially black people—in Indiana and beyond the belief that the Jenkins murder was racially motivated and that no one should be surprised that it had taken place where it did.
The first anniversary of the crime was the occasion for feature stories of the “Anybody Know Carol’s Killer?” variety. After that, more than three decades went by with virtually no substantial media coverage. Still, the crime had lodged in the collective memory of people who could never quite stop speculating about it. The prime suspect, a construction worker whose whereabouts on the night of the murder were unknown, left the state not long afterward and, it was said, later died in a shootout in Illinois. Another suspect had been the owner of the auto-repair shop near where Carol’s notebook was found, a circumstance that gave rise to a widely held screwdriver-as-murder-weapon theory. Both men were among several to whom the police administered polygraphs, and all “passed” (which, given the fallibility of polygraphs, proved and disproved nothing). Talking among themselves, Martinsville residents named names; often, these conversations took place after a few drinks. Beyond Martinsville, the scuttlebutt was that the police were unwilling or too inept to make the case—a point of view that, in time, the victim’s family subscribed to.
What stray facts and factoids have surfaced across the years have tended to deepen rather than illuminate the mystery. After Paul and Elizabeth Davis divorced, she married a man named Gene Scott, and they adopted an infant named Phillip. In 1998, Phillip Scott, by then thirty years old, went to see his half sister Laura Davis Watkins—Paul’s youngest child—and told her that, through friends, he had met people who knew who had killed Carol and how. “They took him to somebody’s house in Martinsville,” Laura told me. “They said everybody in Martinsville knows who killed her. He said he was amazed at how much these people knew. But, for whatever reason, Phillip wouldn’t tell us any more than that.” Actually, Phillip did convey one other piece of information: the murder weapon could be found in an underground gasoline tank at the site of the long-defunct auto-repair shop. Laura’s brother Robert contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and soon Paul Davis heard from a Martinsville police detective. When, a few months later, the gas tank was unearthed, a chisel was found inside, but it didn’t match the dimensions of the fatal wound.
Two years later, the family received another provocative tip, from a woman who refused to give her name. She had been six years old at the time of the murder, she said, but she knew what had happened because she had heard about it from her father. The scenario she described involved more than one guilty party, as well as a screwdriver. When Paul asked for her name and phone number, she said, “I’m sorry. I have a family. I fear for my life.” She never called back. Again, one of Paul’s sons got in touch with the F.B.I., and again a Martinsville detective followed up. By then—the summer of 2000—Paul had long since become disaffected with both the Martinsville police and the state police, who, he felt, had for years arbitrarily withheld information from him. He hired his own private detective, a former state trooper named William McAllister. It took McAllister “about five minutes,” he told me recently, to ascertain that the prime suspect, the construction worker, had not died in Illinois but was alive and living in Florida.
Coincidentally, as McAllister was getting to work, the Indiana State Police were mobilizing a new investigative unit devoted to old homicides, and two detectives were assigned full time to the Jenkins case. That fall, Paul Davis, accompanied by an attorney and some other family members, made one more trip to Martinsville, for a meeting with the new team. Eventually, Paul became persuaded of the detectives’ sincerity, and he authorized McAllister to share his files with them. This past summer, when they had been working on the case for more than a year, the Morgan County prosecutor decided to publicize the reopening of the investigation. When I asked the prosecutor, Steve Sonnega, for a prognosis, he said, “I think we’re making progress. I’m not willing to say how much, because I really don’t know. I think people think that if this case is going to be solved, now is the best time.” In fact, the best time would have been in the fall of 1968, when the physical evidence was fresh, potential witnesses were available, and memories were less impeachable. The suspect in Florida, after initially refusing to coöperate, has reportedly become more talkative, but only in the interest of exculpating himself. Shy of an outright confession, any defendant convicted at this point would have to be approximately as unlucky as Carol Jenkins.
Paul Davis seems far less interested in the formality of a trial than he does in finding some peace. “Once they figure out who committed the crime, I don’t know what they’d do about it,” he said. “But, once I find out, then that will bring the family and me closure. We just want to know who done it and why.
“I pray every night that something comes, maybe some new DNA test. Because, if they don’t get some new concrete evidence, the guy is still going to be walking around free, in Martinsville or wherever he is. But even solving the murder can’t solve Martinsville’s problem. It’ll just help to take a little of the pressure off them that’s been on them for so many years. To solve their problem, they’re gonna have to diversify. They’re gonna have to make it where black people can come in there living, working, and not having fear.”
Four years ago, Martinsville attracted a lot of national publicity—once again, none of it desirable—in the wake of a high-school basketball game. A team with several black players came to town from Bloomington, and afterward its fans complained that they had been subjected to racial taunting and to dirty play on the court. (One black Bloomington player wound up on the floor retching after being violently elbowed.) The subsequent punishment levied by the Indiana High School Athletic Association—a one-year probation, which, among other things, forbade all Martinsville interscholastic teams to host conference home games—still provokes lamentations in Martinsville about unfairness and humiliation. (Not to mention that the out-of-town coverage inevitably dragged in references to the Klan and the Carol Jenkins murder—Q.E.D.)
Aflap with an identical resonance occurred in late October, after the assistant police chief of Martinsville, Dennis Nail, who was unhappy with television news coverage of errant American bombs falling on civilians in Afghanistan, wrote a letter to the Martinsville Reporter-Times in which he railed against the networks for being sympathetic to the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and liberal pieties. The letter wasn’t racist per se, but it didn’t brim with good will toward one’s fellow-man. Among other complaints, Nail bemoaned the outlawing of organized school prayer “because it might upset Hadji Hindu or Buddy Buddha,” and he followed that up with a homophobic rant: “Our country was founded on Christian principles. Talk about majority. When I look around I see no Mosque, or fat, bald guys with bowls in their laps. I see churches. I’m offended when I turn on a television show and without fail a queer is in the plot just like it’s a natural thing. America put God in the closet and let the queers out. When the planes struck the twin towers I never heard anyone utter, ‘Oh, Ellen.’ I heard a lot of, ‘Oh, my God.’ . . . It’s time the dog started wagging the tail. Let’s not be led around by a minority of weirdos and feel gooders. I, for one, am tired of it.” The mayor of Martinsville and the police chief said that, while Nail’s remarks might be offensive to some, he had made them as a private citizen, not as a public official, and therefore wouldn’t be disciplined. During a meeting of the city council nine days after the letter was published, only one of the citizens present criticized Nail, who was in attendance and received a standing ovation.
One of Nail’s most outspoken critics was Joanne Raetz Stuttgen, the folklorist. I asked her whether she could imagine a scenario in which Martinsville might rehabilitate its image. “Legends die hard, if they ever die at all,” she said. “Facts don’t matter much. If people believe a legend, that’s enough. If Martinsville could be magically proved to be the most gracious, charitable, humanitarian, loving Christian community on earth, there would still be people that would continue to believe that it’s not. Belief will always be stronger than the truth.”
The party line in Martinsville, among civic leaders and people in law enforcement, is that the Jenkins murder was motivated not by race but by sex. According to this rationale, Carol Jenkins died because she spurned her killer’s advances. This is, of course, a wishful hypothesis. (How could anyone but the killer know?) Nevertheless, the impulse is understandable. In the aftermath of the Dennis Nail outburst, more than seven hundred Martinsville residents signed a full-page newspaper ad that said, “We respect and affirm the dignity of all people,” but it’s unlikely that any of them imagined this gesture encouraging African-Americans to move there. By now, the people of Martinsville are possessed of few illusions about the rest of the world’s opinions. It might be that places like Martinsville end up performing a perverse public service for those of us who live in racially diverse communities: they make us more than a little smug and spare us the trouble of examining our own bigotries. In a town burdened with Martinsville’s history, an ugly basketball game, a public official having a very bad day—incidents that anywhere else might seem like peccadilloes—easily become caricatures of evil. Martinsville is a familiar landscape, but one less sunny than the one that most of us inhabit. And Carol Jenkins, who was only passing through, has taken up permanent residence there—a moment, a memory, a stigma, as fixed as the rhythm of her telltale heart. ♦
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