When the shadows of a sundown town cloak a chilling tale of loss, the story demands to be told with the reverence it deserves. Together with Alexandra Kitty, a journalist with a keen eye for the often-overlooked narratives in true crime, we unravel the poignant story of Carol Jenkins—a young woman whose life ended tragically on the streets of Martinsville in 1968. Our conversation traverses the haunting intersection of racism, sexism, and the silence of a community shaken by an unspeakable act, only to be broken decades later by a confession that no forensic evidence could unearth.
With each sip of our Mimosas, we raise a glass to the courage that pulses through the veins of victims like Carol, whose story serves as a stark reminder of the vigilance we must uphold. This episode is not just about honoring Carol's memory; it's about confronting the challenges of telling such a story that mainstream true crime media often overlooks. The ethical quandaries of justice racing against time, the profound impact on the families left behind, and the complexities of a case where the passage of years is an adversary—these are the threads that weave through our discussion, offering a sobering reflection on the persistence of those who seek justice in the face of fear. Join us as we shed light on a narrative that, while difficult, is necessary to remember.
Carol's story seemed liked the best episode to wrap up Black History Month. Purchase the book here: Mystery Unveiled: Murder in a Sundown Town – Genius Books (geniusbookpublishing.com)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1336304093519465
https://twitter.com/Murder_Mimosas
https://www.instagram.com/murder.mimosas/
murder.mimosas@gmail.com
https://uppbeat.io/t/the-wayward-hearts/a-calm-hellfire
License code: ZJZ99QK39IWFF0FB
When the shadows of a sundown town cloak a chilling tale of loss, the story demands to be told with the reverence it deserves. Together with Alexandra Kitty, a journalist with a keen eye for the often-overlooked narratives in true crime, we unravel the poignant story of Carol Jenkins—a young woman whose life ended tragically on the streets of Martinsville in 1968. Our conversation traverses the haunting intersection of racism, sexism, and the silence of a community shaken by an unspeakable act, only to be broken decades later by a confession that no forensic evidence could unearth.
With each sip of our Mimosas, we raise a glass to the courage that pulses through the veins of victims like Carol, whose story serves as a stark reminder of the vigilance we must uphold. This episode is not just about honoring Carol's memory; it's about confronting the challenges of telling such a story that mainstream true crime media often overlooks. The ethical quandaries of justice racing against time, the profound impact on the families left behind, and the complexities of a case where the passage of years is an adversary—these are the threads that weave through our discussion, offering a sobering reflection on the persistence of those who seek justice in the face of fear. Join us as we shed light on a narrative that, while difficult, is necessary to remember.
Carol's story seemed liked the best episode to wrap up Black History Month. Purchase the book here: Mystery Unveiled: Murder in a Sundown Town – Genius Books (geniusbookpublishing.com)
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1336304093519465
https://twitter.com/Murder_Mimosas
https://www.instagram.com/murder.mimosas/
murder.mimosas@gmail.com
https://uppbeat.io/t/the-wayward-hearts/a-calm-hellfire
License code: ZJZ99QK39IWFF0FB
Darkcast Network. Welcome to the dark side of podcasting.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Murder and Mimosas, a true crime podcast brought to you by a mother and daughter duo.
Speaker 3:Bringing you murder stories with Mimosas in hand.
Speaker 2:Just a quick disclaimer before we get started. Our show is Murder and Mimosas. It's a true crime podcast. This means that we do discuss crimes including, but not limited to, disappearances, murder and sexual assault. All our episodes are told with the respect of the victims and the victims' families in mind. We strive to ensure that we provide factual information, with some information, if more verifiable than others. With that, grab your Mimosas and let's dive in.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to Murder and Mimosas. So can you tell us your name and a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 4:Well, I'm Alexandra Kitty. I'm a former journalist and I'm also an author, but I was also a true crime researcher for Cineflex's program Time to Kill, also known as Homicide Hours to Kill. That airs on investigation, discovery, and I always had an interest in true crime and I got the honor and the privilege to write my first true crime book called Murder and Ascendant.
Speaker 3:Wow, okay. Was this someplace that was close to you, or what made you pick this? This to ron about?
Speaker 4:Well, the story intrigued me because I worked as a true crime researcher and there's always this concept of fit what fits a program or not? So when you're first starting, you don't know what the fit is. So I wanted to learn what worked for this format and what did the work for this format? And I found out a lot of cases that I would have not known about, and this one really moved me. It moved me for two reasons because it was just a tragedy and second of all, it moved me because I knew that this would not have been a fit for this program and it would have been absolutely essential to tell the story. So I wanted to pursue it further. How did this case that seemingly would check off all the boxes of a true crime genre for television not be able to make it through? So this is where I began going hmm, this fits perfectly, and yet it would be excluded, and that's something that kind of got my curiosity and I wanted to delve into that further.
Speaker 3:Okay, well, do you want to tell us about your book?
Speaker 4:Yes, basically a night, September 16, 1968. There was a young African American woman. She was 21 years old, her name was Carol Jenkins and normally she worked at a, at the Philco factory, but they were on going in, they were in a strike, a long strike, and she had to pay bills, just like the rest of us. So she took a job selling encyclopedias. So she had to go door to door and do this. Now, this was a very resilient way and on her first night she ended up in a town called Martinsville and she was very, very scared because there was rumors Her brother was a played basketball in high school and he played in Martinsville and he was the victim of racial slurs. So she was very scared going there.
Speaker 4:And this was her first night on this, on this job, and was her last night on the job because she was murdered Right out in the open, in cold blood, screwdriver to the heart. And this was totally horrific, because here's a girl who did absolutely everything right and everything turned absolutely wrong. Young lady doing what we would, you know, expect you move on, you define a new opportunity, and when that happened, she was murdered for it and then it took 40 years to find her kill. So this was something that you know has so many elements to it.
Speaker 4:I mean, it is a murder, but it's also about sexism, it's about racism, it's about being afraid to speak the truth when you've witnessed something, and how we deal with complications of a town that had a notorious reputation of being a sundown town, which might be. If you were black, you couldn't go into the town after sundown. You could expect something violent to happen to you, and there was did not. So there's whole bunch of different, very dramatic elements in play, and this was a young woman who you know was over before it began, and that, to me, was just, you know, it's just something. When you are a resilient person and you're somebody who can land on the feet, that's not necessarily something you want to confront, and that's exactly what this case is about confronting the fact when somebody that's absolutely is brave, resilient, kind, moving through her fear and I've had nothing to show for it by the end of the first evening on this future.
Speaker 3:Wow, so did you say what year it was she was murdered? And did I miss that? Yes, it's in 1968.
Speaker 4:So if we put that in context, there was a lot of social upheaval at the time, but it could happen anytime, any place. Yeah, this is what was so fighting.
Speaker 3:So I know you said it took 40 years for her murder to be solved.
Speaker 4:Was it like from DNA or Unfortunately they didn't have very much because the night she was murdered they were torrential raids. So all the DNA, all the forensic evidence got washed. The crime scene wasn't, according to, off. So what happened when people were picking up her items that there was some sort of evidence it got contaminated there. What happened was simply the killer's daughter, after a witness this as a child and after 40 years finally went to the police and said my father was Carol Jenkins murder. So this is my job. It was a cold case that we usually we think of genetic genealogy with. They have fingerprints, we take on the blood, we did a. We rarely think of a witness coming forward forward decades, decades after the facts saying I can, I can solve, partially solve this case. My father and another man I don't know, a, grabbed her and and just in seconds just took her life and she lived with this. She told others over the years but she was too scared of her father to actually go out and say what he had.
Speaker 3:Oh, my gosh so deep. How was this little girl when this happened?
Speaker 4:Well, she was about 79 years old, she wasn't very old, she was literally a little girl, and she drove with her father when she was very afraid of her whole family was terrified of Kenneth Clay, richard, and they drove and he seemed Carol, who was already very afraid because she was there, and they were two young men in a car, kind of getting fresh, with her, and she ran to a house, don and Norma Neal. They called the police. The police came, they determined there was nothing to be afraid of, so they left. So the nails asked this young woman to stay and she didn't want to be a burden, so she went back on the job and within a short time later was actually murdered. So this was something where, you know, the police were.
Speaker 4:Actually she was on the radar because of her fear and so, as I said, this was a case of a young woman who did absolutely everything right. If you feel, you know, uncertain, you call the police. She went for help. The people who helped her wanted to, you know, look to her and the couple. They said they were the biggest regret. Regrets was actually not, you know, trying to be more forceful and insisting that she said so. They felt guilt, not, not, not. They should have felt guilty, but you always do Right. You know, you said somebody who is alive and then they slipped through your fingers, and then you're always going to second guess yourself, no matter what. Unfortunately it was, it was just, you know, a perfect storm and she ended up literally getting murdered in a torrential rage and right in the middle of the street in a live out in public.
Speaker 3:There were no witnesses or anything, though, or just they didn't come forward.
Speaker 4:Well, there weren't any witnesses. The only witness was a young man in his apartment who heard her scream. He ran out and he didn't have a telephone. She had to run to a restaurant to call the police. There was that audio witness who didn't hear anything about her scream. So this is how little they had in terms of I mean, they had her timeline. It was amazing how much the police could reconstruct People, witnesses seeing her walking down the street. They could account on everything about the last 15 minutes of her life, which was that was actually most important 15 minutes. Yet we know what happened seconds after. We know 15 minutes before exactly where she was. They could map out her trail quite accurately, but what they couldn't do is figure out how and this happened within seconds. This would not have even been 15 minutes. This probably was to maybe a couple of minutes for being grabbed, putting a screwdriver thrust into her heart until they literally tore open and they just escaped.
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Speaker 3:So did they leave her body there on the street or yes, she staggered about 15 feet.
Speaker 4:She still managed to stagger out in the open at 15 feet, couldn't say anything, couldn't do anything and collapsed Just as it started to rain. So I mean it was horrible luck that she was murdered. And then, to add insult to injury, the rain started coming down and washed away any potential evidence that there could have been to to point guilt. So this was literally working with less than nothing. And then to compound it, there were people, bystanders, who came, picked up her notebook, picked up her briefcase, picked up things that she had and gave it to the police. So their fingerprints, their DNA were over these.
Speaker 4:So this was as messy and Martinsville the police at that time they hadn't dealt with the murder in that case. So this was considered a very safe town. They couldn't solve it. And then very in short order, in a few years, there were eight other unsolved murders in the area unrelated to carols, but it's just sort of kind of came all down at once. So one tragic, you know murder the can that was left unsolved kind of gave other killers ideas that they could come here and work with the community and unfortunately many of them were correct.
Speaker 3:Wow. So the daughter that turned her father in by the time she turned him in had he passed. Is this why she felt comfortable enough to do it?
Speaker 4:Well, no, actually she was still alive, she had kids. He was still alive. And when she told her sister-in-law and then her sister-in-law told other people, so it was sort of a great fun kind of thing that happened. And then eventually the police came to her and said well, is this true? And she said yes. So I mean, she was very scared to even go forward after. She felt comfortable with her former sister-in-law, but she did eventually tell police and that's how they cracked the case open. It was just well, there was people going to, you know, going around telling other people. Yes, there was a witness to this and it was the killer's own daughter.
Speaker 3:So was there a motive at all to killing her, or just for?
Speaker 4:pleasure. Well, I think it was partly for pleasure and partly because she was black and he was a Klansman. He had a bad history. This was not the only person he was accused of murdering, except he was getting acquitted for various reasons. So he had a very violent history. There was domestic abuse in that background. So he was not known as a pleasant Richmond was not known as a pleasant fellow by any structure the imagination so. But he wasn't from Martin's, which was quite interesting.
Speaker 4:He was driving through seeing Carol and saw that she wasn't with anyone because she arrived with three other people. A friend of hers who was also black was also her first night. The two of them worked at the same factory, got the same job they're a supervisor and another gentleman who was white. So they all split. You take Northland, I'll take Southland, and that's how they were working in different quarters of this town which they had to take at the last minute.
Speaker 4:They were going to another town called. They were going to go to another town called Vincenzo. Unfortunately, because they were held back during the training of the first day of the job, they had to go to someplace that was closer, a little less economically prosperous, and that's how they ended up in Martin's so she was alone. They came as a group of four, they split up and she got killed on, you know, during the first few hours of this jaunt into Martin's and by the time her friend came back from selling and her friend was also accosted. By the way, that night, by the time she came back she found out that Carol, her friend that she'd known for years, was a murderer. So this was something that stayed with this other young woman as well.
Speaker 1:Hello everyone out there in podcast land. I'm movie miss, one of the co-hosts of the great podcast about bad movies called let's Talk Turkeys, where you'll find our format is a bit different than the other talking head programs you're used to. I'm a Gen Xer. My co-host is a millennial, so we're usually on the same page, but we do occasionally agree to disagree and we always have a good laugh. Join us as we cover the good, the bad and the ugly of cinema. You can find us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you find quality podcasts.
Speaker 3:But not by the same man, though.
Speaker 4:No, not that they would know she. Just she was walking down the street and she was accosted. She was told to come over there and she didn't listen. She wisely left because she also felt so intimidated coming to Martin's. But they wanted to buy a tear gas gun for collection. This is how scared Carol and her friend were going here. Did you say tear gas gun? That's what they were, young women. Well, they didn't know what to do.
Speaker 3:They didn't get one of course I didn't even know that was a thing a tear gas gun.
Speaker 4:You didn't die. I mean, I'm sure she was justified in her reality. That's what the scary thing was. A lot of times you're scared and people go oh come on. As I said, this was a case of we're talking about check works, of doing everything you're supposed to do when your instinct tells you you're in danger. Carol did it, she did, she did it. Everything runs. I mean, this is, and everyone horribly won't. I think this is the crux of this case. This is something we can all relate to. How many times in our lives we've done everything we're supposed to? We were clever, we're brave, we plan, we create strategies. Most of us get through it. Carol did the same thing, for her trouble was murdered.
Speaker 3:That's just so sad. And she was so young, 21.
Speaker 4:I mean, she didn't even start. She didn't even start.
Speaker 3:Did this happen to be her first job? I mean, it might not be her first job, since she's spring going.
Speaker 4:No, she was her second job right out of high school. She worked as a factory worker at Filco. The problem was that Filco was under a very intense, prolonged strike so she was locked out. So she had to get another job. So her son goes. Well, why don't we sell encyclopedia's door to door? So she said OK. So she said OK, I'll do this.
Speaker 4:I mean, she was known as being very quiet, very reserved. This required her being very outgoing. And the sad thing is when you read newspaper accounts of Carol's first night, she was starting to become outgoing. She was going door to door and when reporters were interviewing the neighbors who saw her then they'd go. She was so lovely, she was so nice and bubbly and outgoing that we really liked her. So people started to fall in love with Carol, who only met her for a few minutes.
Speaker 4:So here was something that she went out of her comfort zone to try something and she was starting to flourish on her first day. You think first day jitters you can understand she would be overwhelmed. Except she really took the bull by the horns and started to do a fantastic job on the first day and said OK, this is my situation, I'm going to make the best out of this situation. So again, check marks. Yes, this is Carol's corner. You can't fit all the check marks. She gets all the bonus marks you can be proud of, and this is the last thing that was with Carol Jenkins' dessert, and I think that.
Speaker 4:I think this is what you know, what I wrote this. This really was something you know. You always tell people be resilient, fight back. You know, pick yourself up, you know, fall down seven times, get out there, and she did all that. And now what? So that was to me, you know, part of the reason that her story really resonated for me. And the other is being a true crime researcher, where you're looking at cases where, yes, this fits the bill In true crime TV. We want a victim that you know likes up a room where they end up.
Speaker 4:All this other thing, yeah, and she's perfect. You know she was, you know would have been something, you know, something of a icon for people. I mean, they would have said, yes, this is, you know, someone I can relate to. This is an everyone, this is someone I can see my walking in her shoes. And yeah, you know, this is something that we have never seen on true crime television. She was covered once, but there were two other cases. So this is why Carol Jenkins story such an awkward fit for true crime TV. That was also one of my you know things I wanted to explore. You know, this is some story that we need to tell over and over again and yet we you know podcast do cover this when we're talking about true crime TV. It's a different animal completely, and this is okay. Why don't? Why doesn't this? Why can't we make this? I know we can make it. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's tricky.
Speaker 3:I know you said that he had cancer. Did he end up serving anytime or did he pass?
Speaker 4:He walked out and died before the trial began. Oh my God, one of those things where you get. I mean, it was what I would call a cascade and catastrophe, starting with the strike, a field call, come all the way to the fact that prosecutors were trying to beat the clock because he had cancer. When they arrested him, he was able to walk, he was able to move, he was coherent, cognizant, and it was just an. So they were trying to fight faster and faster to get motion in, and the fence was giving them a grief and objecting. So they were fighting against the clock. They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late. They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late.
Speaker 3:They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late.
Speaker 4:They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late. They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late. They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late.
Speaker 3:They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late.
Speaker 2:They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late. They were trying to get a dying man on the stand before it's too late.