Carolyn Benington was never one to leave the office at lunch, which is why, on June 10, 2019, her co-workers noticed right away when she headed home and never came back. At first, they just tried calling her. By early evening, with no answer and a growing knot of worry in their stomachs, they asked police to do a wellness check. When officers arrived at her apartment complex around 6:00 p.
m. , they found the front door unlocked. Inside, Carolyn was lying dead on the floor, surrounded by a pool of blood. A neighbor told police he’d heard screaming around noon, followed by odd noises, like someone dragging furniture across the floor.
But there were no security cameras in the building, and no one could place a stranger near her door. Inside, the scene was sterilized. The killer had doused the apartment in bleach. And when the autopsy came back, the brutality of what had happened made the room feel colder.
Carolyn had been beaten in the head multiple times, likely with fists. Then she had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck with two things: a pair of scissors and a screwdriver. Both belonged to her. Nothing was stolen.
There was no sign of sexual assault. This wasn’t a robbery gone wrong or a random intruder. Whoever did this came with rage, not a motive police could easily file away. For weeks, detectives questioned everyone who knew Carolyn.
Her family described her as kind, easygoing, non-confrontational. She wasn’t seeing anyone. There were no jealous ex-boyfriends. No hidden enemies.
No one could think of a single person who’d want her dead. Then they turned to her office. And one detail snapped their attention into focus. On the same day Carolyn left for lunch, a 30-year-old accountant named Kenneth Saul also left the office.
He didn’t return until late in the day. His boss explained that Kenneth had called in, claiming car trouble. He said he needed to stop by a repair shop. But when the manager checked, Kenneth had never gone to the shop he mentioned.
And other co-workers noticed other things. When Kenneth finally came back, his hands were covered in fresh scratches. He seemed jittery, nervous. At lunch, during a casual conversation, he asked a strange question: could the police arrest someone based only on circumstantial evidence?
Detectives took notice. Kenneth was a husband. A new father, in fact. His daughter had been born a year earlier.
He had no criminal record. He didn’t fit the profile of a killer. But he had lied about where he’d been. When police first spoke to him, Kenneth repeated his story: he’d left during lunch to get his car repaired.
But he had no receipt, no proof of any kind. Then, when pressed, he changed his story. He said he hadn’t gone to a repair shop at all. Instead, he fixed his car himself, in a park near work.
The shift didn’t sit right with investigators. Kenneth was an accountant, not a mechanic. And the vague park location sounded exactly like the kind of thing a guilty man makes up on the spot. Still, without hard evidence, police couldn’t move forward.
They kept digging, and then they got lucky. Surveillance footage from nearby buildings didn’t show much. But dash cam footage from a patrol car that passed through the area that same afternoon did. It captured Kenneth’s car on camera.
Not near the park. Near Carolyn’s apartment building, in a different town, miles away from the office. The footage contradicted his alibi completely. Then there was the matter of the skin found under Carolyn’s fingernails.
She had scratched her attacker during the struggle. And Kenneth had fresh scratches on his hands that he couldn’t explain. But when police collected his DNA and sent it for testing, it came back inconclusive. The sample was too small to match definitively.
They couldn’t prove he was the killer, but they couldn’t clear him either. For weeks, investigators kept searching for anything more. Nothing surfaced. Finally, they decided the combination of circumstantial evidence was strong enough to bring forward.
Two months after Carolyn’s murder, Kenneth Saul was arrested and placed in jail while awaiting trial. And then, the case took a turn no one could have predicted. While locked up, Kenneth got a new cellmate. And that cellmate sent a letter to detectives, claiming Kenneth had made him a chilling offer.
He had offered him $15,000 to commit a murder once he got out of jail. The instructions were specific. The victim had to be a random woman between 25 and 30 years old. The weapon had to be a screwdriver and a pair of scissors.
He was told to stab her in the neck and clean the scene with bleach afterward. Detectives knew the cellmate was telling the truth. These details hadn’t been released to the public. Only the killer could have known exactly how Carolyn was murdered and how the crime scene had been cleaned.
Kenneth’s plan was to stage a copycat murder while he was already behind bars, making it look like a serial killer was targeting young women. He figured that would shift suspicion away from him permanently. But there was more. Kenneth also offered the cellmate a second, even more bizarre plan.
He could either kill the lead detective on the case, or kill one of the people police had interviewed during the investigation. If he chose the second option, Kenneth instructed him to stage the scene so it looked like that person had murdered Carolyn, even suggesting leaving a note on the body confessing to the crime. The goal was to make police believe the case was solved and let Kenneth walk free. It was a plan so convoluted it sounded like a child’s fantasy.
But Kenneth was serious. Detectives asked the cellmate to wear a wire. He agreed. And within days, they had Kenneth on tape, casually discussing plans to arrange multiple murders.
The same day, prison staff searched Kenneth’s cell and found handwritten notes. They were confessions to Carolyn’s murder. He had written them himself, planning to plant them on the body of whoever his cellmate was supposed to kill. He assumed no one would bother to compare the handwriting.
Kenneth had handed investigators even more evidence, and added new charges of conspiracy to commit murder to his list. But even with all of that, detectives still could not figure out why Kenneth had killed Carolyn in the first place. For years, Kenneth stayed in jail. Then, in November 2022, three years after his arrest, prosecutors made a difficult call.
They still lacked a definitive DNA match, fingerprints, or any rock-solid physical evidence tying him to the scene. Their entire case rested on circumstantial evidence that might not survive trial. The risk was too high. So they offered Kenneth a deal: admit to the murder in exchange for a reduced sentence.
And Kenneth accepted. The confession finally revealed the truth. Kenneth started working at the same company in 2016, three years before the murder. He met Carolyn and developed romantic feelings for her, despite being married.
Carolyn was not interested, and she made that perfectly clear. But Kenneth couldn’t accept it. He kept those feelings buried beneath a calm surface, hiding them from everyone. But inside, his fixation grew unchecked.
He never bothered her, never said an inappropriate word. To everyone else, it looked like he had simply given up. But privately, his obsession spiraled into stalking. At some point, Kenneth took Carolyn’s house keys without her noticing and had a copy made.
Then he returned the originals. Once he had a copy, he started letting himself into her apartment whenever she wasn’t home, usually during lunch breaks. And then he went further. He installed hidden cameras inside her apartment.
Carolyn never knew. For months, Kenneth used his lunch breaks to enter her home and check on the cameras. On June 10, 2019, he went again. What he didn’t know was that Carolyn had also decided to go home that day.
Because he’d left the office early, he had no way of knowing she was on her way. Carolyn was used to spending her lunch hours in the office. Her sudden return caught Kenneth completely off guard. He was inside her apartment when he heard the key in the lock.
Quickly, he slipped behind the front door, standing hidden in the space she couldn’t see. When Carolyn walked in, he knew there was nowhere to run. As soon as she saw him, he attacked. He slammed her to the floor, hitting her in the head with his fists.
Then he grabbed her scissors and screwdriver and began stabbing her, mostly in the neck. When she was dead, he tried to clean up with bleach, but there was too much blood. So he grabbed every hidden camera from the apartment and fled. He returned to work that day like nothing had happened.
In January 2023, Kenneth Saul was sentenced to 45 years in prison for the murder, plus an additional 10 years for conspiracy to commit murder. Before sentencing, he gave a final speech in court, apologizing to Carolyn’s family. “I’m sorry every day for my choices. If there was any way I could take back things that I’ve done, I would without any question.
I regret immensely the pain I have caused you all. There are no words big enough to describe the atrocities I’ve done or the misery I’ve brought on you. ”
He also apologized to his own family, present in the courtroom. He spoke of the facade he had kept up his entire life, hiding who he truly was from the people closest to him.
But many who worked the case doubted his sincerity. He had not only murdered Carolyn to avoid being exposed, he was willing to pay someone to kill innocent strangers to escape responsibility for his own crime. Kenneth’s wife, who had known nothing about his double life, filed for divorce shortly after his arrest. And despite his tearful apology, Kenneth immediately appealed his sentence, arguing that some of the evidence had been obtained in violation of his constitutional rights.
In late 2024, the appellate court rejected his appeal, finding no legal issues with the investigation. Kenneth Saul will spend the rest of his life in prison.
