No Choirboy: Murder, Violence, and Teenagers on Death Row

On August 12, 1997, in Richmond, Virginia, 16-year-old William Jenkins was finishing his second day of work at Bullets, a fast-food restaurant. Suddenly, an armed robber entered the back door and placed the muzzle of his pistol to William’s neck, demanding money from the safe. Though William began to cooperate, the robber, 23-year-old Charles Bass, fired. William died instantly. Outside, another Bullets employee heard the shots and called 911, leading to the swift apprehension of the assailant and his two teenaged female accomplices.

William had two siblings: Paul, who was 13 at the time of the murder, and Mary, who was 10. Approximately nine years passed before Kuklin interviewed them: Paul was by then a junior at Virginia Commonwealth University, and Mary was a sophomore at Marymount University, also in Virginia. Both of them sat down together with Kuklin in Mary’s dorm room. William’s parents—Licia Hedian, a midwife, and Bill Jenkins, a drama instructor at Dominican University—also contributed to the dialogue via email. At the time of William’s death, they had been divorced for several years, but Bill was still closely involved with the family.

Mary prefaces the conversation with an admission that she and Paul have never discussed William’s death with one another, though both have occasionally talked about him to their mother.