Deceased suspect's charges dismissed

MARTINSVILLE -- A judge dismissed murder charges against a suspect who died, despite prosecutors' urging to keep the 34-year-old case open.\nKenneth C. Richmond, 70, Indianapolis, died of cancer on Aug. 31. A judge already had ruled that brain damage from strokes had left Richmond mentally incompetent to stand trial in the 1968 murder of Carol Marie Jenkins.\nMorgan County Prosecutor Steve Sonnega had pressed to keep the case open in an effort to identify a possible second suspect.\nRichmond's attorney, Steve Litz, said authorities could not prosecute a dead man.\nJudge Christopher Burnham agreed to dismiss the murder charge.\nRichmond was charged in May with what prosecutors said was the racially motivated murder of the 21-year-old Rushville woman who was selling encyclopedias in Martinsville.\nAuthorities arrested Richmond after his 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.\nShe has said there was a second man involved, but she has not been able to identify him.\nThe 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.