Secrets in Pleasant Prairie

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Speaker 5 This was a very cold, calculating plan.

Speaker 5 This innocent, kind, loving woman, those two boys were everything to her. Just imagine all that Julie lost.

Speaker 6 Julie Jetson was found covered with a blanket on the bed.

Speaker 5 You've got a suspicious death. Is it a homicide? Is it a suicide? We just didn't know.

Speaker 9 One of the things the police learned, Julie had an affair.

Speaker 4 Correct.

Speaker 6 She reported having pornographic pictures left outside the home, like on the car or in the garage.

Speaker 10 These photos are showing up at the office. They're phone calls, heavy breathing.

Speaker 12 Somebody was stalking her, harassing her.

Speaker 14 Who would harass a couple like this?

Speaker 12 We had talked about potential suspects.

Speaker 10 She wrote a letter. She said, if something happens to me, please hand this to the police.

Speaker 16 She predicted her own death.

Speaker 10 She did.

Speaker 7 Essentially, talking from her grave.

Speaker 16 Nobody.

Speaker 17 Nobody deserves what she went through.

Speaker 5 I want Julie's voice to be heard.

Speaker 19 It was that magical time of year in Kenosha County, Wisconsin.

Speaker 21 Nestled along the shores of Lake Michigan, in a village called Pleasant Prairie. Colorful lights twinkled and Christmas carols filled the air.

Speaker 28 But in a house a block from the lake, there was no holiday cheer, only the eerie sound of a phone off the hook.

Speaker 33 It was late afternoon, December 3rd, 1998.

Speaker 8 40-year-old Julie Jensen, a wife and mother of two young boys, wasn't breathing.

Speaker 33 Julie's husband, Mark, found her in bed under the covers.

Speaker 35 EMT Dave Wilkinson was at home when he got the call that a woman was in trouble.

Speaker 7 You hop in your truck and...

Speaker 36 And we go to the house where we find our patient.

Speaker 37 We are here at the Jensen home.

Speaker 35 Responding officers were already on the scene.

Speaker 5 We were called this afternoon for a death investigation.

Speaker 6 They were allowed in the house by Mark Jensen.

Speaker 25 Barry Olilla is a captain with the Pleasant Prairie Police Department.

Speaker 6 He directed them to the bedroom where Julie Jensen was found.

Speaker 39 The EMT found her lying in bed as if she was sleeping, but he knew it was too late to save her.

Speaker 36 There's something different about the way her face, her body looked.

Speaker 4 It wasn't peaceful.

Speaker 40 He could tell Julie had been dead for a while, but had no idea how she died.

Speaker 7 You don't see anything obvious on her, like a gunshot wound or a knife wound, correct?

Speaker 13 Correct.

Speaker 36 There wasn't that obvious trauma that we associate with a violent death.

Speaker 18 That was odd to you. Yeah.

Speaker 36 If it's a drug overdose or something like that, I would expect to see something, drug paraphernalia around.

Speaker 4 We didn't have that.

Speaker 36 It was just very unusual circumstances.

Speaker 27 Her husband explained to the police that he came home after picking up their two boys from school and found Julie unresponsive.

Speaker 18 Did Mark have any idea of how she might have died?

Speaker 6 Mark Jensen explained that Julie had been taking some medication and she wasn't feeling well for a few days prior up and including this day.

Speaker 45 The police did find medication on the kitchen counter.

Speaker 18 Mark told them it was an antidepressant Julie had just begun taking.

Speaker 46 He said Julie had been suffering from depression for the last several months.

Speaker 18 She'd lost her appetite and was having trouble sleeping. How is Mark behaving?

Speaker 6 It appeared that he was distraught and concerned.

Speaker 47 Meanwhile, in the next town over, Bob Jambois, the Kenosha County District Attorney at the time, was out with his wife Beverly at a black tie hospital fundraiser.

Speaker 10 Bob had a tux and I wore a gown and we went to the ball.

Speaker 8 So you're having a nice evening.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 10 And Bob got paged.

Speaker 5 I go out to my car and I call the Pleasant Prairie Police Department.

Speaker 10 And then he came back. He said he had to leave.

Speaker 18 Beverly stayed at the gallop while Bob rushed over to the Jensen home.

Speaker 5 As soon as I saw Julie Jensen's body, I could observe that the positioning of her body was the way her arm was spread out underneath her.

Speaker 5 I said she was rolled into that position.

Speaker 5 Nobody goes into that position naturally of their own accord.

Speaker 33 The DA found that suspicious.

Speaker 25 He wanted the police to search the house, but there was a problem.

Speaker 5 At this juncture, we don't have sufficient probable cause to support a search warrant.

Speaker 18 Jam Boise had an idea.

Speaker 47 If it worked, he wouldn't need a warrant.

Speaker 8 So he went looking for Julie's husband. An officer was watching the Jensen boys, three and eight years old, while family and a police chaplain consoled Mark.

Speaker 5 I introduced myself and I said, you know what, we have to do what's known as a full-fledged death scene investigation. Will you agree to give us consent for us to search your residence?

Speaker 5 So he said, yes, we could have consent.

Speaker 28 Investigators began gathering evidence and noticed the family had a home computer.

Speaker 9 In 1998, they were still considered a luxury.

Speaker 5 I said, we're going to be taking that computer. This is the first time I'd actually seen a computer in the home at a crime scene.

Speaker 18 As they continued to search, investigators learned something potentially crucial to the case.

Speaker 50 It turns out, local police were quite familiar with Mark's wife.

Speaker 6 Our officers had a relationship with Julie Jensen. They knew each other on a first-name basis based on the number of calls that she placed to our agency.

Speaker 26 Julie had been calling the Pleasant Prairie Police Department for years to report harassment, repeated hang-up calls to her and her husband.

Speaker 44 And even more frightening, she said they'd found pornographic pictures planted at Mark's office and outside of their house.

Speaker 18 Your prosecutor's senses must be going off, given that the police have been there so many times.

Speaker 5 Yeah, prosecutors don't believe in coincidences.

Speaker 18 The DA had a hunch this was no accident.

Speaker 40 Could the disturbing harassment be linked to Julie's death?

Speaker 8 A secret was about to be revealed.

Speaker 12 Julie had admitted to having an affair.

Speaker 39 And as the investigation unfolded, an explosive piece of evidence would surface too.

Speaker 10 If something happens to me, please hand this letter over to the police.

Speaker 20 What had killed Julie?

Speaker 5 Normally at autopsy, you test for things like barbituates, heroin. The tech screen came back negative.

Speaker 9 Nothing.

Speaker 25 This is a mystery. It really was.

Speaker 40 And who might be behind it?

Speaker 5 She called the police if she saw a strange car across the street.

Speaker 25 She must have been terrified.

Speaker 10 She was terrified.

Speaker 8 District Attorney Bob Jamboise was stumped.

Speaker 9 Julie Jensen, a young mother, was dead.

Speaker 30 But why and how?

Speaker 29 When her autopsy report landed on his desk, he scoured it for answers.

Speaker 7 What does it tell you about cause of death, manner of death?

Speaker 5 To be determined,

Speaker 5 not determined, so I don't know the cause or manner of death after the autopsy.

Speaker 18 So Jamboys and detectives from the Pleasant Prairie Police Department turned their attention to finding out more about Julie.

Speaker 28 They learned she was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, not far from where she died.

Speaker 38 One of six children, she was the only girl surrounded by brothers who adored her.

Speaker 54 She was an angel of a person, and I don't say that about many people.

Speaker 18 And that's not just because she was my sister.

Speaker 54 It's because it was true.

Speaker 55 It was a loving family, and it was a Christian family that she grew up in.

Speaker 35 Leslie Ferrara was one of Julie's closest childhood friends.

Speaker 18 They grew up just a few blocks apart.

Speaker 17 She was a sweetheart.

Speaker 55 Just a very good human being. I mean, she was fun.

Speaker 55 Julie played violin, as did did I.

Speaker 17 She was very smart, very good at school, very conscientious.

Speaker 29 The DA learned Julie and Mark first crossed paths when they worked together part-time at Sears.

Speaker 5 She met Mark in the mid-early 80s. Then they started dating, I think, when they were in college.

Speaker 18 After Mark graduated, the couple tied the knot in the spring of 1984 and eventually settled in the upscale Carroll Beach neighborhood of Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin.

Speaker 30 Mark was a successful stockbroker.

Speaker 18 Julie had also worked in the financial world.

Speaker 5 She was an administrative assistant in a stockbrokerage firm, but she had a Series 7 license, which you have to have

Speaker 5 in order to place orders for customers.

Speaker 18 In 1990, they welcomed their first son, David.

Speaker 38 Five years later, Douglas came along.

Speaker 45 Mark was known around town as being quiet, but also ambitious.

Speaker 38 He soon made a name for himself at his firm while Julie put her career on hold.

Speaker 10 She was a stay-at-home mom, and she was a babysitter.

Speaker 18 Looking for help with the case, the DA turned to his wife Beverly, an experienced attorney. What did you learn about Julie Jensen?

Speaker 10 Oh, I learned that she was a wonderful mother, that her children were everything to her. Her license plate said my three Ds, which stood for Daddy, David, and Douglas.

Speaker 9 Life seemed good for the Jensons.

Speaker 39 Neighbors saw a happy couple working on house projects together.

Speaker 21 enjoying each other's company while their children played nearby.

Speaker 32 Reality, however, was less picture-perfect.

Speaker 43 Captain Olilla says police were well aware the Jensens had been dealing with something ugly.

Speaker 18 Those harassing calls and X-rated photos showing up seemingly out of nowhere.

Speaker 6 Outside the home, like on the car or in the garage, even.

Speaker 26 Jam boys learned the harassment didn't stop there.

Speaker 5 Julie wrote in her log because she kept a log of all of this. New tactic.
Emails.

Speaker 17 With photos?

Speaker 5 Yeah, emails with penis photos on them.

Speaker 25 She must have been terrified.

Speaker 10 She was terrified.

Speaker 18 Angelina Gabrielle, an assistant DA at the time, also worked the case.

Speaker 10 And she was very embarrassed and humiliated that this kept happening.

Speaker 7 Julie had made a report that the outdoor furniture had been rearranged.

Speaker 5 Yes, and she called the police if she saw a strange car across the street.

Speaker 18 Julie contacted the police dozens of times over the seven years she lived in Pleasant Prairie, but the department had limited resources.

Speaker 41 And as time marched on, catching the person harassing Julie fell to the bottom of their pile.

Speaker 7 The department's officers were having a really hard time pinpointing who this could be.

Speaker 6 That'd be accurate, yes.

Speaker 18 At one point, police suggested the Jensens hire a private investigator.

Speaker 40 Julie and Mark met with PI Dave Ellis, a former police officer.

Speaker 12 She was very, very concerned.

Speaker 12 She was scared.

Speaker 39 During that meeting, Julie revealed a secret that got the PI's attention.

Speaker 57 something she'd already shared with the police and her husband.

Speaker 21 Years earlier, she'd had a fling with a co-worker named Perry Tarika.

Speaker 33 She suspected he might be behind all this.

Speaker 17 That's a difficult thing to share, especially right in front of your husband.

Speaker 12 Yeah, she seemed remorseful and embarrassed.

Speaker 53 Julie told the PI that it happened when she had Perry over for dinner one night while Mark was away.

Speaker 7 Did she express if they had any other intimate encounters after that?

Speaker 12 No, she just had a lot of guilt and just said, you know,

Speaker 12 this is just can't happen again.

Speaker 27 The police had already looked into Perry and discovered he'd moved to North Carolina, so they doubted he was behind the harassment.

Speaker 9 But the Jensens weren't so sure.

Speaker 12 They suspected he would come to Chicago at the end of the week, drive up to Kenosha,

Speaker 12 do his deed with the pictures, and then go back.

Speaker 30 Eventually, the pictures started showing up not only around their house, but also outside Mark's office, slipped under the windshield wiper of his car.

Speaker 12 There were pictures of a man and a woman. The woman was performing oral sex on the man.

Speaker 44 Could you see any faces?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 39 The Jensens hired the PI to do surveillance outside Mark's office.

Speaker 38 They said the X-rated photos usually showed up there on a Friday.

Speaker 12 So this is the location I parked when I did the surveillance.

Speaker 44 Did you think you were going to see someone put things on his car?

Speaker 12 I thought there was a good chance

Speaker 12 because they had narrowed it down to a Friday, narrowed it down to

Speaker 12 between noon and five.

Speaker 44 For several hours, he watched and waited.

Speaker 20 No one came.

Speaker 12 No one came.

Speaker 28 The PI planned to try again the following Friday, but then Julie called him.

Speaker 12 Mark and Julie had said that they had both decided that they were going to terminate the surveillance.

Speaker 43 Two years later, he learned Julie was dead.

Speaker 12 I was shocked because it started out as a harassment case.

Speaker 57 The DA was still trying to figure out how Julie died.

Speaker 41 He'd been on the case about a month when her blood tests came back.

Speaker 5 Normally, at autopsy, you test for things like barbituates, heroin. The dock screen came back negative.

Speaker 9 Nothing.

Speaker 25 This is a mystery.

Speaker 5 It really was.

Speaker 18 Meanwhile, investigators were studying that home computer they'd taken from the Jensens.

Speaker 8 It was about to send the case in a whole new direction.

Speaker 5 I didn't feel I could exclude the possibility of a suicide.

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Speaker 18 A few months after Julie's mysterious death, DA Jam Boys finally got a break.

Speaker 28 It came from the Jensen's home computer.

Speaker 20 Someone had been searching drug interactions and poisons, in particular, ethylene glycol, the main ingredient in antifreeze.

Speaker 7 Now you have something to work with, potentially.

Speaker 5 So we took this new information to our medical examiner and we said, what can you do to test for ethylene glycol?

Speaker 49 Was it too late? No.

Speaker 29 So they tested Julie's blood again, and what the forensic toxicologists found this time changed everything.

Speaker 8 Traces of ethylene glycol.

Speaker 40 The DA now knew Julie had been poisoned, but didn't know how.

Speaker 5 I spent hours and hours and hours learning about ethylene glycol poisoning. And what I learned is that most ethylene glycol deaths are suicide.

Speaker 24 Suicide.

Speaker 9 Had Julie Jensen killed herself?

Speaker 48 After researching her past, he could see how it was possible.

Speaker 5 We had Julie Jensen going to see a family therapist in 1990 and 91 in which she told him of a family history of depression and in which she complained of being depressed and he prescribed a Paxil to her.

Speaker 31 Julie had been diagnosed with postpartum depression after her first son was born.

Speaker 8 And when Jam Boise dug a little deeper, he discovered that wasn't the only time Julie had been prescribed an antidepressant.

Speaker 5 We had her going to see the doctor and telling him on December 1st that she was miserable and she was very, very unhappy and depressed. And he prescribed Paxil to her just a few days before she died.

Speaker 68 Did she ever mention suicide to the doctor?

Speaker 5 No.

Speaker 5 In fact, the doctor had asked her about suicide, and she said I would never commit suicide.

Speaker 56 He knew it wasn't uncommon for someone to say they wouldn't do it and later go through with it.

Speaker 49 But he thought too many things weren't adding up.

Speaker 30 For one, police didn't see any ethylene glycol in Julie's house.

Speaker 5 In the typical suicide by ethylene glycol, the person is found dead in a room with an empty glass.

Speaker 30 And there wasn't much of the poison in her system.

Speaker 10 Suicide deaths by ethylene glycol are always large quantities. People don't slowly dose themselves.
They do it all at once with a large ingestion that they believe will kill them immediately.

Speaker 8 So this didn't look like suicide.

Speaker 9 The toxicology report suggested Julie had been ingesting the poison over a few days.

Speaker 18 The more you looked at all the circumstances, the more you believed this looks like murder.

Speaker 5 It looked like murder. Yes.

Speaker 8 The police once again looked into Perry Tarika, the man Julie had the brief affair with.

Speaker 48 They checked his phone records, spoke to his boss.

Speaker 18 Your department did do a whole investigation into Perry.

Speaker 3 They cleared him.

Speaker 27 And of course, detectives took a close look at Julie's husband.

Speaker 28 Turns out they'd uncovered other evidence on that home computer.

Speaker 33 Mark had had an affair of his own.

Speaker 5 There was evidence, clear evidence of a romantic relationship with Kelly Labonte.

Speaker 8 An assistant who worked for the same brokerage firm as Mark. Police discovered racy emails between the married lovers.

Speaker 5 Kelly Labonte worked in the St. Louis office.
He worked in the Kenosha office. But he he went to St.
Louis on a couple of occasions, and he commenced having a sexual relationship with her.

Speaker 5 And he was doing that in the months preceding Julie's death.

Speaker 51 And according to Mark's co-workers, it was no secret.

Speaker 18 Stacey Bauer, another assistant at the brokerage firm, met Mark and Kelly when they briefly worked together setting up a new branch office.

Speaker 13 Did you know that Mark was married?

Speaker 65 Yes.

Speaker 43 Which piqued her interest since Mark and Kelly were spending all of their time in an office away from everyone else.

Speaker 44 What are people saying? What's the gossip?

Speaker 69 I think they're having an affair, something's going on, and you know, she just got married. She just came home from her honeymoon.
And look at those two. And isn't this weird?

Speaker 18 The more police looked into the case, the more they were looking at Mark.

Speaker 18 Then, one day, about four months into the investigation, Mark popped into the station with his nine-year-old son David, looking for any updates.

Speaker 29 The police saw an opportunity.

Speaker 18 This is a significant moment here in this investigation.

Speaker 5 A moment that I didn't know was taking place as it was taking place.

Speaker 26 The lead detective took a chance and asked Mark to follow him into an interrogation room while another officer watched his son.

Speaker 37 You know, I was going through

Speaker 37 things here this morning.

Speaker 33 The detective had a long list of questions for Mark, like what happened the morning Julie died.

Speaker 37 She's pretty bad off.

Speaker 37 She wasn't looking good. She couldn't.
No motor control. She was bad off enough to where she should have called the rescue squad, but she didn't want you, Julie.
She didn't want me to.

Speaker 37 Well, rights, I should have. You know, in hindsight, I know that.
So you didn't do anything to aid in her death.

Speaker 37 But you didn't do anything to stop her from dying. I really didn't.

Speaker 37 I just watched it happen.

Speaker 49 That admission clearly caught the detective's attention.

Speaker 70 He then asked Mark to explain something that had been puzzling police.

Speaker 39 The autopsy photos showed Julie's nose pushed to the side.

Speaker 50 He offered to show them to Mark.

Speaker 37 You can see here, look at the nose.

Speaker 37 How it's bent, like it was pushed into the pillow.

Speaker 8 Mark looked at at the pictures but gave no explanation.

Speaker 41 The detective grew frustrated.

Speaker 37 You want to talk to me here? It seems like you're all curving the outsides here.

Speaker 29 He thought Mark was hiding something, but he had a plan to rattle him.

Speaker 50 He was about to show him a letter from Julie.

Speaker 56 Her voice from the grave.

Speaker 10 It's one of those moments where he's thinking, oh my god, I'm done.

Speaker 21 A stunning new clue for investigators, One that Julie herself left for them to find.

Speaker 10 She said, if something happens to me, if I die, please, you know, hand this letter over to the police.

Speaker 16 She predicted her own death.

Speaker 10 She did. She did.

Speaker 9 In the interview room, the lead detective investigating Julie Jensen's murder was starting to lose his patience.

Speaker 47 Julie's husband, Mark, seemed to dodge every question.

Speaker 37 I can't get a kind of a straight answer from you.

Speaker 49 The detective pressed him about his relationship with Kelly Labonte.

Speaker 37 Who's Kelly?

Speaker 37 Who's Kelly?

Speaker 8 And there it was.

Speaker 30 The detective knew that was a lie.

Speaker 8 And it was a doozy.

Speaker 18 Not only were Mark and Kelly a lot more than friends, friends, police discovered Kelly had left her husband and moved into Mark's house just weeks after Julie died.

Speaker 5 By this time, Mark Jensen, by the way, had paid $12,000 to Kelly Levante to move from St. Louis to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Speaker 20 And not only that, investigators were stunned to learn just days after Julie's death, Mark had thrown out all of his wife's things.

Speaker 8 Perhaps to make room for his girlfriend, they thought.

Speaker 5 Just sitting out with the garbage. All of her clothes, everything.
There was like 10 to 15 garbage bags tossing her life out.

Speaker 14 This is sounding like the oldest motive in the book.

Speaker 7 Killing your wife so you can be with the other woman.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 37 So is she your girlfriend now, or at least somebody you're dating? Is there a fair statement? A dating or putting against you is crowded media.

Speaker 71 Mark Jensen continued to downplay his relationship with Kelly.

Speaker 44 And as the interview dragged on, the detective tried a new approach.

Speaker 37 You've got got to do something.

Speaker 37 Okay, you have to, Mark. I mean, she just didn't die naturally.

Speaker 46 Mark wouldn't confess.

Speaker 43 And what happened next took the buttoned-up stockbroker by surprise.

Speaker 18 The detective pulled out a letter written by none other than Julie herself, addressed to the Pleasant Prairie Police Department.

Speaker 37 Here we have Julie Jensen telling me that if she died, you're the person that said this.

Speaker 8 The detective learned Julie wrote the letter after she found a post-it note written by Mark with a shopping list of things that alarmed her.

Speaker 8 This list was in my husband's business daily planner, not meant for me to see.

Speaker 44 I don't know what it means, but if anything happens to me, he would be my first suspect.

Speaker 47 Julie even sent a photo of the list.

Speaker 24 On it, drug supply, razor blades, syringe.

Speaker 27 She wrote, I pray I'm wrong and nothing happens, but I'm suspicious of Mark's suspicious behaviors and fear for my early demise.

Speaker 28 Prosecutor Angelina Gabrielle learned Julie had given the letter to a neighbor shortly before she died.

Speaker 10 And she said, if something happens to me, if I die, please, you know, hand this letter over to the police.

Speaker 16 She predicted her own death.

Speaker 10 She did. She did.
Read it.

Speaker 22 And now, the letter was in the hands of the man Julie named as her likely killer.

Speaker 26 The detective wanted Mark to read it alone.

Speaker 27 Just stay here. Let me go.
Let me go grab the solar.

Speaker 18 As the minutes ticked by, Mark appeared frozen.

Speaker 8 Only his eyes moved as he read and reread Julie's words.

Speaker 10 It's one of those moments where he's thinking, oh my God, I'm done.

Speaker 10 Mark is an arrogant man, and he did not expect Julie to have the wherewithal to come to these conclusions and put them in writing and give them to someone else for safekeeping.

Speaker 18 When the detective came back, again, he pushed Mark to confess.

Speaker 70 Well, I told you

Speaker 70 I speak back.

Speaker 70 I'm not

Speaker 70 only anything bad.

Speaker 49 The detective kept at it.

Speaker 37 You had to do something to cause her death, Mark. You're the only person that was there, and you're the only person that could have done anything.

Speaker 37 Be honest with me. Be straight with me, Mark.
Be a man.

Speaker 37 Tell me what happened here.

Speaker 49 Mark insisted the detective had it all wrong, but the detective wouldn't let up.

Speaker 57 He accused Mark of being the one behind the X-rated photos that had tormented Julie for years, guessing he planted them in retaliation for her brief affair.

Speaker 37 Well, she wasn't ever close.

Speaker 70 Mark claimed he wasn't the one who planted the photos in the first place, but he said he held on to them and later put a few X-rated photos around the house to upset Julie.

Speaker 18 It was something, but of course humiliating and harassing his wife with pornography was not an admission of murder. After four hours, the police had no choice but to let Mark walk out of the station.

Speaker 71 And even though the district attorney thought Mark was the killer, he didn't think he could prove it.

Speaker 17 You had a lot of things working against you

Speaker 5 in this case. We did.
Everybody was telling me I didn't have enough evidence to convict Mark Jensen.

Speaker 47 The DA knew from the toxicology report that Julie had been poisoned with ethylene glycol, but he had no evidence that Mark gave it to her.

Speaker 22 And he couldn't say for sure Mark was the one searching it on the home computer.

Speaker 7 And as for Julie's letter pointing the finger at him, you'd think once you hear a letter like this that it's game over.

Speaker 18 That, well, I guess we have our killer.

Speaker 5 There were problems with the letter.

Speaker 13 It wasn't that easy, was it?

Speaker 5 In terms of its admissibility.

Speaker 44 The issue for the prosecution was that defendants have the right to cross-examine anyone who provides evidence against them.

Speaker 40 In this case, Julie couldn't be questioned because she was dead.

Speaker 44 But the prosecutor didn't think that should apply in this case.

Speaker 5 Mark had forfeited his right to cross-examine the witness because he was responsible for being gone. So I had to convince the judge that this letter was admissible, and it was a huge fight.

Speaker 39 A fight that would take years.

Speaker 9 All the while, the prosecutor watched Mark move on, building a successful construction company and a new life with his girlfriend.

Speaker 18 Then he saw an announcement in his local paper.

Speaker 5 I read the newspaper that Mark Jensen was marrying Kelly Labonte, and I thought, she's victim number two.

Speaker 5 When he gets tired of this toy, he's going to toss her in the trash heap like he did with Julie.

Speaker 43 Even though the prosecutor didn't think he had an airtight case, he got an arrest warrant and charged Mark with first-degree murder.

Speaker 8 The police headed over to the Jensen house.

Speaker 57 Jambois figured Mark had no idea what was coming.

Speaker 7 What was the look on Mark's face when he was arrested?

Speaker 5 I think he was very shocked when he was arrested. Mark always thought of himself as just the smartest guy in every room.
He always thought he could talk himself out of everything.

Speaker 38 It was a short victory for the prosecutor.

Speaker 26 Mark didn't stay behind bars for long.

Speaker 5 He posted a half million dollar cash bond.

Speaker 18 From there, the case stalled while the prosecutor fought to have Julie's letter admitted at trial. Mark's life once again seemed to go on as if nothing had happened.

Speaker 10 Getting married, working, having another child, raising the two children whose mother he murdered.

Speaker 7 This must have been just eating away at you that he's out there free.

Speaker 5 It's stuck in our crop.

Speaker 8 But things were about to change.

Speaker 52 A surprise witness appeared out of nowhere and dropped a bombshell.

Speaker 18 Did you think about going to the police with this to warn Julie?

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Speaker 21 The years ticked by.

Speaker 33 Mark Jensen remained out on bail with no trial trial in sight.

Speaker 45 Bob Jambois left the DA's office in 2005 to work for the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, but he wasn't about to let go of Julie Jensen's case. It had become an obsession.

Speaker 9 He continued as a special prosecutor.

Speaker 5 I was laid awake at nights thinking of ways I was going to prosecute Mark Jensen, assemble the evidence to hold him accountable for what he'd done to Julie.

Speaker 8 It wasn't until eight years after Julie's murder that the case finally broke wide open.

Speaker 35 Jambois presented a new witness at a pretrial hearing.

Speaker 18 Ed Klug, a co-worker of Mark's, said the two had been at a business conference about three weeks before Julie's death.

Speaker 52 He and Mark were drinking at the hotel bar.

Speaker 15 The more he drank, the more he started to talk. And I had gone through some marital issues.
So, and I think he kind of brought up how he hated his wife.

Speaker 18 How deep did this conversation go?

Speaker 34 Well,

Speaker 15 basically, it went very deep because he talked about how he could kill her. At At first I thought he was just all, you know, you joke, well, I'm going to kill my wife.

Speaker 15 But it's like the more he talked and the more details of

Speaker 15 telling him about the websites you could go to, the

Speaker 15 poisons.

Speaker 18 And did you think about going to the police with this to warn or warn Julie?

Speaker 15 No, at that time I didn't because I didn't know how serious he was.

Speaker 39 Still, Ed told this story to several other people, including office assistant Stacey Stacey Bauer.

Speaker 39 He said, as the conversation went on with Mark, he said he really started to feel weird and that Mark really did want his wife dead.

Speaker 41 What did you think about that?

Speaker 53 I'm like, weird. What an odd guy.

Speaker 10 And then I kind of forgot about it.

Speaker 56 But all that changed a month later.

Speaker 18 Ed came up to me again and he said,

Speaker 69 Julie Jensen is dead. And I said, oh my God, I mean, he killed her.

Speaker 40 After hearing Ed's story, the judge took immediate action.

Speaker 5 He quadrupled Mark Jensen's Jensen's bond.

Speaker 8 Mark couldn't make bond and was sent straight to jail.

Speaker 43 The judge also did something Jam Boys had been arguing for for years.

Speaker 5 Judge Schrader ruled that the letter was admissible. It was coming in.

Speaker 47 That's a huge win.

Speaker 5 It was a huge win.

Speaker 40 But would it be enough to convince a jury?

Speaker 8 On January 8th, 2008, nine years after Julie was murdered, Mark Jensen went on trial.

Speaker 5 This case was front page every day.

Speaker 32 In his opening statement, Jam Boies read Julie's letter, her once private thoughts pointing the finger at her husband.

Speaker 5 If anything happens to me, he would be my first suspect.

Speaker 50 Jam Boise painted a picture of a terrified woman who was not suicidal, as the defense would claim, but desperate for help, even reaching out to a Pleasant Prairie police officer days before her death.

Speaker 5 And he told Julie, there's really no basis for us to suspect that your husband is trying to kill you. And really, if you're concerned about that, you should go to a woman's shelter.

Speaker 5 You You should take your children and leave.

Speaker 43 But Julie didn't take that advice.

Speaker 8 Jam Bois says she was afraid of Mark and worried that if she fled, he would take her boys.

Speaker 5 But she was prepared to put her own life at risk rather than abandon her two boys.

Speaker 9 The prosecutor showed the jury numerous searches for poisons on the Jensen's home computer.

Speaker 8 But more importantly, he also pointed to online activity the very morning Julie died.

Speaker 5 We saw these searches for ethylene glycol poisoning at 9.40 in the morning on December 3rd, 1998. These two searches for ethylene glycol.

Speaker 52 Jam Boise argued that it had to have been Mark doing the searches, not Julie.

Speaker 21 Remember, Mark himself told police Julie couldn't get out of bed that morning.

Speaker 37 She wasn't looking good. She couldn't.
No water control.

Speaker 5 If you're in bed and you can't speak and you can't move,

Speaker 5 you can't be looking up ethylene glycol on the computer. And by the way, those two searches were then double deleted.
And that was one of the linchpins.

Speaker 5 That was one of the best pieces of evidence we had.

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 28 To tell the jury how Mark poisoned his wife, the prosecutor called a controversial witness, a convicted con man named Aaron Dillard, who shared a cell block with Mark Jensen in the county jail.

Speaker 52 Jim Boys learned about the con man after Dillard wrote a letter to his lawyer claiming Mark not only admitted that he killed his wife, he described how he did it.

Speaker 5 This letter clearly reflected evidence, information that could only have come from the person that murdered Julie Jensen.

Speaker 8 Gretchen Rosenke was Aaron Dillard's lawyer.

Speaker 44 If Aaron Dillard is telling the truth, he's providing a window into Julie Jensen's final moments of her life.

Speaker 18 What exactly did he tell you he heard from Mark?

Speaker 42 Mark told him that

Speaker 42 she didn't die just after ingesting the antibree. So after the kids were at school, he pushed her head into the pillow till she suffocated.

Speaker 39 Jam boys had suspected asphyxia from the beginning because of the unnatural position of Julie's arm tucked under her body and the way her nose was bent to the side.

Speaker 5 When we rolled her back, she was like, her face was squished off like this.

Speaker 18 So the con man's story made sense.

Speaker 38 Jambois asked Diller to tell the jury what Mark said happened step by step.

Speaker 61 He gave her juice to drink, and that was when he told me at that point that it was mixed with antifreeze.

Speaker 8 Diller testified that Jensen told him he'd given Julie small doses of antifreeze mixed into her juice over a few days.

Speaker 21 On the morning Julie died, his boys saw how sick she was and wanted their dad to call for help.

Speaker 61 He told them that if she wasn't better by the time they got home from school, that she would, uh, he would call the ambulance.

Speaker 35 The clock was now ticking.

Speaker 51 Hours went by.

Speaker 18 Dillard says Jensen told him he came back to check on Julie and she was still breathing. The boys would be home soon.

Speaker 8 So according to Dillard, Jensen said he took matters into his own hands.

Speaker 61 That's when he said he rolled her over and just sat on her back and pushed on her neck into the pillow.

Speaker 5 He wanted to be with the other woman, and he had a lot of money. And he didn't want to share any of it with Julie.

Speaker 10 He didn't want to share the children?

Speaker 18 But Mark's attorney, Craig Alby, told the jury the prosecution had taken the facts and come to the wrong conclusion.

Speaker 62 Finally, after nine long years,

Speaker 62 Mark Jensen can clear his name.

Speaker 56 The defense argued that Mark didn't kill Julie so he could be with the other woman.

Speaker 28 Instead, they said Julie killed herself so she could get revenge by framing Mark Mark for her murder.

Speaker 62 Her depression and her despair and her anger and her delusional thinking caused her to point the finger at Mark.

Speaker 57 Dr.

Speaker 9 Richard Borman, Julie's primary care physician, testified for the defense that she came to see him just two days before her death.

Speaker 59 You know, she seemed to be depressed and distraught and almost frantic, actually.

Speaker 35 Dr.

Speaker 33 Borman said Julie was concerned about her family's history with mental illness, especially her mother's struggle with alcoholism and depression.

Speaker 59 She was very concerned about going down the same path as her mother

Speaker 59 and was afraid of that, didn't want to be labeled crazy.

Speaker 18 And as for Aaron Dillard, on cross-examination, the defense accused the con man of making up his story to help himself.

Speaker 62 Mr. Dillard, while you were in the Kenosha County Jail, you saw Mark Jensen as a way to get out of jail, right?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 27 The trial dragged on for seven weeks, one of the longest criminal trials in Wisconsin history.

Speaker 18 Jam Boise was hoping for a quick verdict, but three days passed and the jury was still out.

Speaker 8 But then came word.

Speaker 68 We, the jury, find the defendant Mark D. Jensen guilty of intentional homicide of the first degree.

Speaker 26 The judge gave Mark the harshest possible sentence, life without the possibility of parole.

Speaker 8 But this case was far from over.

Speaker 40 After years of appeals, a federal judge made a decision that just might allow Mark Jensen to walk free.

Speaker 18 At a press conference after Mark Jensen's guilty verdict, Bob Jambois described him as one of the worst criminals he'd ever prosecuted.

Speaker 76 I cannot recall a more cold-blooded, calculated, brutal offense than this one.

Speaker 43 His co-counsel, Angelina Gabrielle, got emotional.

Speaker 40 She, like Julie, had two young sons.

Speaker 55 I think that this was more about

Speaker 77 preserving Julie's memory for her boys.

Speaker 77 Because

Speaker 77 not only did Mark kill her, but he killed the memory that these boys had of her.

Speaker 8 And the guilty verdict stood for years.

Speaker 22 Mark remained behind bars while his legal team appealed.

Speaker 39 Then, 13 years after his conviction, a Supreme Court decision changing admissibility rules opened the door for Mark Jensen.

Speaker 28 An appellate court vacated his conviction, saying Julie's letter should not have been admitted.

Speaker 57 The court granted Mark a new trial, and in January of 2023, he faced 12 new jurors.

Speaker 8 But with one big difference, this time they would not hear about the letter.

Speaker 18 Did you think that that would hurt you?

Speaker 5 I thought that. I thought it would hurt us.

Speaker 18 Jam Boise came back once again as a special prosecutor.

Speaker 39 This time, he tried the case with Deputy DA, Carly McNeill.

Speaker 8 Where were you in your life when Julie Jensen died?

Speaker 72 I was in eighth grade. I had no idea that it even happened.

Speaker 13 Much of the evidence was the same.

Speaker 57 Ed Kluke told the jury about the conversation he had with Mark three weeks before Julie died.

Speaker 15 He told me he was going to kill his wife.

Speaker 18 Jailhouse snitch, Aaron Dillard, testified about Mark confessing to killing Julie.

Speaker 61 He sat on her back and then pressed her face into the pillow.

Speaker 22 And another former inmate who shared a cell block with Mark also told the jury a damning story.

Speaker 18 Back in 2007, David Thompson was in the Kenosha County Jail for bank robbery when he met Mark.

Speaker 78 We came kind of close. You know, we would talk every day, drink coffee together every morning.

Speaker 18 Mark eventually shared with David that he wanted to stop his coworker, Ed Kluk, from testifying against him.

Speaker 18 What did he want to happen to Ed?

Speaker 78 He wanted him kidnapped, you know, to prevent him from coming to trial. And I told him, I might be able to make that happen for you.

Speaker 43 Wow. And how did Mark respond to that?

Speaker 78 Oh, he was ecstatic. He was happy to hear that.

Speaker 9 Thompson says he had no intention of going through with it.

Speaker 78 It was never going to happen. It was just a scheme to trick Mark out of some money.

Speaker 41 He told Mark for $1,000 he could have someone kidnap Ed and hold him until after the trial.

Speaker 18 Did Mark ever talk about having Ed killed or was it just kidnapping?

Speaker 63 Whatever needed to be done,

Speaker 78 he wanted done.

Speaker 29 Jam Boise played a jailhouse recording of a call from Mark to his wife Kelly asking her for money, but he didn't tell her what it was for.

Speaker 15 How much? Oh,

Speaker 15 maybe like $500.

Speaker 15 Okay. Maybe twice, and that would be it.

Speaker 20 $1,000, just as Thompson had described.

Speaker 21 And there was something else. The answer to a big question.

Speaker 40 A computer forensic specialist uncovered zip drives that finally revealed who was behind the pornographic photos that frightened and humiliated Julie for years.

Speaker 18 The photos were emailed from a sender with the name Turtle.

Speaker 16 Did Turtle have any connection to Mark Jensen?

Speaker 72 Turtle was mjenson at execpc.com. He had simply changed the name

Speaker 72 in the from, you know, you just type in a new name. Right.

Speaker 5 This is what connected this trove of pornographic photos on Mark Jensen's work computer to these penis photos that are being left around Julie Jensen's home.

Speaker 49 Mark had a new defense team.

Speaker 39 Again, they argued that Julie was depressed and killed herself.

Speaker 13 But without Julie's letter, they didn't claim she tried to frame Mark.

Speaker 18 And they also had a new witness, Julie and Mark's son, David, now 33 years old.

Speaker 7 Did you think that that would resonate with the jury that Julie's own son is standing by his dad?

Speaker 72 You know, that was something that we definitely had concerns about because we didn't know what he was going to say. You wanted your dad to take your mom to the hospital, right?

Speaker 18 The discussion was that if she wasn't feeling better when we got home, we'd take her to the hospital.

Speaker 30 In the end, the prosecutors thought his testimony helped their case.

Speaker 72 His father promised him if he came home from school on December 3rd and his mom wasn't better, they would take her to the hospital, which matched exactly what Aaron Dillard said.

Speaker 72 The reason for the suffocation is because

Speaker 72 Julie wasn't dead yet and David was coming home from school.

Speaker 30 The verdict was swift.

Speaker 9 The jury took less than seven hours to find Mark Jensen guilty of first-degree murder. He was sentenced again to life without parole.

Speaker 44 For Bob Jambois, the sentencing was the end of a 25-year quest.

Speaker 9 He finally had justice for Julie.

Speaker 7 How did you feel when you looked at him in court the second time?

Speaker 5 I felt like

Speaker 5 putting my gun away. I got that son of a bitch.

Speaker 5 And every time that I have a nice steak dinner with a good glass of wine, I'm going to enjoy it all that much more knowing Mark Jensen's getting down a bologna bologna sandwich and a glass of water because that guy's going to die in prison

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