Man charged with 1968 murder dies from cancer

INDIANAPOLIS - A man arrested this spring after his daughter told police she saw him fatally stab a black encyclopedia saleswoman in Martinsville 34 years ago died Saturday having maintained his innocence.\nKenneth C. Richmond, 70, died from bladder cancer at Larue D. Carter Memorial Hospital, where he had been treated for the last several weeks, defense attorney Steve Litz said.\nRichmond was charged in May with what prosecutors said was the racially motivated murder of 21-year-old Carol Marie Jenkins of Rushville.\nThe 1968 crime has long haunted Martinsville, a nearly all-white rural central Indiana city of about 12,000, which has been branded racist in part because of Jenkins' unsolved slaying.\nA judge this month ruled that Richmond, who doctors said had also suffered brain damage from strokes, was not mentally competent to stand trial.\n"He never admitted any involvement in the murder or any knowledge of it," Litz said. "He really wanted the opportunity to show a jury and the world this was not something he ever did."\nHis daughter, Shirley Richmond McQueen, told investigators that at age 7 she watched from a car as her father, a white man, stabbed Jenkins in the chest with a screwdriver in a drunken rage while yelling racial slurs.\nJenkins' father, Paul Davis, said Saturday he was disappointed that Richmond died without facing a trial in the murder.\n"It is not like I wanted it to be, but that is God's will," he said. "I feel very strongly that he committed the crime. I believe Shirley is telling the truth and that she saw what she saw.\n"She said she would always remember Carol from the yellow ribbon she was wearing around her neck that night."\nMcQueen had told detectives that another white man she could not identify was in her father's car and held Jenkins during the attack.\nDavis said he believed Richmond could have helped investigators find the other person involved.\n"I feel like God gave him time to redeem himself, and I feel like he should have freed his daughter because she is afraid someone else is out there looking for her," Davis said.\nProsecutors would have had a difficult time convicting Richmond because they had no physical evidence and were relying only on his daughter's childhood memory, Litz said.\nDavis said he is angered that Litz continues to repeat Richmond's claims of innocence because the defense pushed to have him declared mentally incompetent for a trial.\n"I don't know how (Litz) can continue to say the man is so innocent when he also didn't know what he was talking about," Davis said.