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It took eight years to catch the man who killed Linda Jensen in her Big Lake home—even though two other men had already confessed to the crime.

Sherburne County 15 crosses the Elk River just north of highway 10, then takes the first of several gentle curves west toward Big Lake. It’s the kind of rural two-lane you might see in an SUV commercial—mom at the wheel undaunted by the icy road, back seat full of kids gazing out at the snow-softened landscape. The homes are set back in wooded lots every quarter mile or so, close enough to be neighborly, but distant enough to be secluded. The distinctive stained-wood exterior of the house that Charlie Jensen built still looks the same as it did one winter evening in 1992 when it was plastered all over Twin Cities’ television screens, but Charlie hasn’t seen it in a long time. “I can’t bring myself to look at it,” he says.

The Jensen’s nine-year-old son Joe had gotten off the school bus at the end of the long driveway about 3 o’clock that afternoon. He dragged his bum leg through the snow toward his house, and pushed the unlocked door open. He cast a quick glance at his baby sister Lisa who was sitting in her playpen with poopy diapers and teary eyes, then made a beeline for his room and booted up a video game. The aliens materialized, and started to advance. Lisa began crying. Otherwise it was too quiet in the house. Joe wondered where his mom was. He and Linda Jensen were close, and he had a feeling that something was wrong.

While Joe had called three men dad in his life—two abusive drunks and Charlie Jensen— his mom was a constant. She’d mothered him with a special passion because of a stroke he’d suffered at birth that left him with a limp and a weakened arm. She’d protected him when the men in her life got nasty, and comforted him when he brooded about his handicaps. Linda Jensen’s presence was something Joe had always been aware of. Now he sensed her absence. He walked over to the open door of his parents’ bedroom and looked in. The bedclothes had been pulled off. They were piled on top of something on the floor at the foot of the bed. He ran back to the living room and lost himself in the video game. About an hour later Charlie Jensen arrived home. As he drove up the driveway the symbols of the day’s frustrations were in plain view. The pickup truck he had for sale sat unsold behind the house, and nearby his wife’s van was up to the hubcaps in freshly fallen snow. Obviously it hadn’t moved, yet he’d been trying to reach her off and on all day. Why didn’t she answer the phone, he wondered, vaguely irritated.

Charlie stomped the snow off his shoes in the walkout. Joe was sitting in the living room in front of the video screen, a few feet from the playpen where Lisa sat sniffling. “Lisa’s here alone—mom’s not around,” Joe blurted out, before Charlie could ask. Charlie picked up his daughter. He glanced into the bedroom, saw the stripped bed, and hurried down to the laundry room. Linda wasn’t there. He went back to the bedroom with Joe following him, noticed the bedclothes on the floor, and saw his wife’s head poking out from underneath. The bedspread, he realized, was pinned to her chest with a knife. Shocked, he put the baby down and pulled back the bedclothes. Linda Jensen had been disemboweled. She’d been murdered so brutally that Charlie’s first thought was of some grisly ritual.

“I couldn’t stand to look at it,” he told investigator Gary Polusny of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s office. “I said, ‘Joe, mom’s dead you know,’ and Joe went hysterical. Then I called 911.” That evening Charlie told investigators that he suspected Joe’s biological father was the killer. “He’s got a hell of a temper, and he hated Linda for not staying with him,” he said. “He’d call her up and just scream at her.” Charlie’s speculation on the evening of his wife’s murder was the first promising lead in a gruesome murder case that took eight years to solve.Charlie Jensen married Linda Halvorson in 1972, when she was 17. They had a son, Andy, divorced six years later, then remarried in 1991. Between marriages to Charlie, Linda was involved with two men who ultimately became suspects in her murder. Both men knew how to party, and when Linda met them she was an attractive young woman looking for a good time. She met Bob Beard through a boyfriend of hers who’d been in jail with him. Beard relied on chemicals far too heavily to become proficient at his chosen trade of burglary, but he wasn’t much of a candidate for a straight job either. He was doing life on the installment plan when he and Linda became an item. Their son Joseph was born in 1982. “Beard beat her when he was drunk, then begged her to forgive him when he got sober,” says an investigator. “They broke up because he walked in and found her with John Silliman.” Linda and Silliman were married in 1986. Silliman adopted Joe, and they moved to California, where Silliman worked as an elementary school teacher. Joe provided an insight into the nature of that relationship when an investigator asked him if anyone in the family had ever threatened to hurt his mom. “I remember one time when my dad in California threw her down the stairs,” he replied. Bob Beard renounced any visitation rights with his son when Silliman adopted the boy. In return Silliman took legal responsibility for Joe’s support—-an arrangement both men came to regret. Charlie Jensen told investigators that Beard called Linda regularly asking to see his son, but she refused. “In my mind, he’s a real suspect,” Charlie said at the time, “and the only other person that would have so much hate for her would be John Silliman.”

He explained that Silliman had been calling Linda and complaining bitterly about his continuing child support obligation. The marriage it was predicated upon had ended in 1990, when he kicked Linda and Joe out with nothing but $200 and an old car. Linda called Charlie from Las Vegas the next day. “It was what I’d been praying for,” he said. He and their son Andy drove west to help her, and Charlie and Linda remarried about a year later. Linda, then 37, had matured into the woman her friends would describe to investigators two years later: friendly, outgoing, and motherly.

The Sherburne County Sheriff’s office and the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension conducted the murder. An autopsy revealed semen in the murdered woman’s vagina, and the DNA extracted from it did not match Charlie Jensen’s. From then on the case was characterized as a rape/murder, an assumption the public defender would later dispute. There were other important clues as well. The knife used to murder Linda Jensen came from her own kitchen, suggesting that the crime was the result of a fit of uncontrolled rage rather than a planned act. The investigators theorized that someone had entered the home on the basis of a ruse, attempted to seduce Jensen, and was rebuffed. “There was talk that it might be a random act, but I felt strongly that the answer lay close to home, and that’s where we focused,” says Sherburne County Sheriff Bruce Anderson.

According to Charlie, the investigators took over the house for the first week or so, a period during which the enormity of their loss was just starting to sink in. Linda’s big smile, her sense of humor, all the little household routines that she’d been part of were suddenly gone, replaced by the comings and goings of murder investigators. “Their system is to start with the people closest to the victim and work their way out,” Charlie explains. “It took them a couple days to clear Andy and me. Then they started questioning the neighbors.”

Linda Jensen’s habits suggested some related lines of inquiry. She’d jogged on County 15 regularly, so people who routinely drove that road were interviewed. She’d often spent mornings at the Monticello Athletic Club—where she’d leave her daughter Lisa and her son Andy’s infant daughter Natasha in the day care center while she worked out—and various people she’d met there were questioned.

When investigators went to California to check Silliman out, they discovered that his DNA didn’t match, and that he’d been in school the day of the murder. “We looked at his phone records, did some other investigating, and satisfied ourselves that he wasn’t party to the crime in any way,” says Anderson. By then it had become apparent that eight-month-old Lisa had been traumatized. “She panicked when she heard loud noises,” Charlie explains. “There must have been a lot of screaming when it happened, and to this day nobody knows what she saw.”

Lisa’s condition was one of several good reasons to sell the house. Charlie, a contractor, had done most of the construction on the place himself. “It was tough,” he says. “It tugs at your heart to leave something you’ve built, the home where we were going to raise our family, but there was no way we could stay there.” But selling the house wasn’t the only difficult change. As soon as Silliman was cleared, he demanded that Joe come to California to live with him. Queried if it was done out of love, Charlie laughs. “It was done because Joe stood to get the survivor’s benefit from Linda’s Social Security,” he says. Joe would live in California for the next nine years, a period he describes in one word: hard. Silliman remarried while he was there, leaving Joe an outsider in a family in which he didn’t feel he belonged. He lived for his Christmas and summer visits to Minnesota. “I was happiest when my mom and my dad Charlie and I were all together,” Joe says. “I never wanted to leave.”Linda’s former boyfriend Bob Beard had a good alibi, but one thing complicated matters for him: He’d told his girlfriend that he killed Linda Jensen. Beard had taken up with Eddie Mae Crockett after Jensen left him. Crockett told investigators that Beard often threatened to kill her. Shortly after the murder he’d advised her to look to the fate of Linda Jensen for an example of what happened to women who angered him. “I killed her and I’ll kill you too,” he said. To the unpracticed ear that sounds like a big break in a murder case, but to experienced investigators it was little more than static. “You’d be surprised how common that is,” says Everett Doolittle, a former BCA agent who worked the Jensen case. “A woman in an abusive relationship tells us that her boyfriend claims he murdered someone, and there’s an aspect of the story that lends it some credibility. In reality it’s just another form of abuse, but we can never discount it entirely. Beard was questioned many times. His DNA didn’t match, his alibi checked out, and we concluded that he had nothing to do with the murder.” Doolittle, a 32-year veteran of law enforcement, spent more of his career than he cares to remember following up false leads on homicides. Many of them come from sources he calls “fruitcakes,” people for whom some minor connection to a crime becomes a major life event. They often start rumors and embellish little snippets of fact in order to keep the melodrama rolling. The investigation of Linda Jensen’s murder would encounter that phenomenon as well, but not until it had almost ground to a halt. As months passed, then years, a grim cycle began to repeat itself in the lives of Linda’s survivors. “It would build starting around Christmas,” says Charlie, “and peak in February, on the anniversary of the murder. Another year and no progress, you’d think. Just grief.”

On the afternoon of the murder the mail carrier on County 15 had seen a pickup truck coming out of the Jensen’s drive. She was familiar with the people on her route, and she didn’t recognize the two occupants. She told investigators that one of them raised his arms as if to shield his face when she looked at them, and there appeared to be blood on the sleeves of his jacket. Investigators found her story intriguing, but couldn’t correlate it with anything they’d discovered until much later, when a Monticello woman came forward with some third-hand information concerning a man named Richard Christy. “He was a strange dude,” the woman said in a recent interview. “I met him about ten years ago when he came to a party at my apartment. I was 19, and he must have been in his 30s, but he always hung out with a younger crowd.” According to an investigator, Christy frequented several well-known party houses near the Jensen’s. “The other people in that bunch, let’s see, there were some antique dealers and flea market guys,” he says. One of the guys belonged to the Monticello Athletic Club, where he brought Christy a few times as a guest. Allegedly, Christy said that he’d seen Linda Jensen at the club, and called her “a fancy lady” that he hoped to meet.

The man who brought Christy to the club showed up at the Monticello woman’s home in tears one night, with a story to tell. “A friend of his got a call from Christy one morning in 1992,” the woman told investigators. “He said he needed to be picked up over in Big Lake right away.” The man who received the call—later identified as Monticello resident Mike Chandler— drove his pickup truck to the Holiday Station in Big Lake, where Christy was waiting. “I’m in some deep shit,” Christy allegedly said. “I just freaked out and offed a woman.” The story goes like this: Christy supposedly told Chandler that he’d been at a party on County Road 15 the previous night. He’d been kicked out about 8 a.m., and had knocked on the Jensen’s door to use the phone a few minutes later. Linda Jensen answered in her bedclothes, one thing led to another, and he’d stabbed her to death. According to the story, Christy and Chandler drove to the Jensen home that afternoon and loaded up some evidence, including bloody sheets, which they later buried.

The investigators recalled the mail carrier’s story, and wondered if she hadn’t seen Christy and Chandler leaving. It was their first real lead in years, and it fit their theory of the case, but Christy denied everything. He gave them a DNA sample that didn’t match, and he passed a lie detector test. Chandler, who would’ve been the key to proving or disproving Christy’s involvement, had died of a heart attack before the Monticello woman came forward with her tale. The antique dealer who’d told her the story in the first place recanted. Nevertheless, investigators continued to interrogate Christy regularly, and told his acquaintances that they were interested in any information they could get.

And that’s where things stood when the BCA’s cold case unit entered the investigation in 1998. The unit was formed in 1991 and has solved 12 murders since. It deals with crimes that have been on the books for years, yet are assessed as having a good probability of solution given the proper resources. A multi-agency task force is usually organized to do the investigating. It works according to a protocol devised by the BCA.

A BCA analyst pulled together all the evidence in the Jensen case for re-examination, and a task force made up of BCA agents and sheriff’s investigators from several counties was assembled. A reward of $10,000 for information leading to the killer’s arrest was posted, and a media blitz was organized around the sixth anniversary of the crime. “Back in 1992, when the initial investigation took place, they had to get blood for a DNA sample,” says Everett Doolittle, who headed the cold case unit. “By the time we got involved the technology had changed and all we needed was a swab off their cheek. We taught teams how to get the swab, and sent them out with a list of people whose DNA we wanted. Some had gotten out of prison, some were people who lived nearby and had no alibi, some we just couldn’t eliminate any other way. They weren’t suspects exactly. We had no strong suspects, but we did have a list of almost 100 people we wanted to clear.” Doolittle reviewed the file on Christy. “He was a red herring,” he says, a depiction seconded by his chief investigator, Randy Stricker, who now heads the cold case squad (Doolittle teaches law enforcement). “In our opinion Christy had been eliminated,” says Stricker, “but the publicity brought another squirrel out of the woodwork and we had to do it all over again.” He is referring to Monticello resident Terry Drahota, a convicted meth manufacturer who came forward in 1999 claiming he’d seen Christy covered with blood the day of the murder. He said Christy later admitted killing Jensen, and described “carving her up.” Drahota told Stricker he’d been with Mike Chandler when he died in 1997. He said Chandler told him that he regretted helping Christy clean up the crime scene, and had asked him, with virtually his last words, to make sure Christy was punished.Drahota couldn’t explain why he’d waited until two years after Chandler’s death to go to the authorities, but he did inquire about the recently posted reward. When Stricker pressed him for details he said his recollections were “foggy” because of his drug use. He did recall that Christy’s admission that he’d stabbed Linda Jensen came during a conversation the two of them had in a garage on Chandler’s property, but according to construction records the garage wasn’t built until long after the confession allegedly took place.

Meanwhile the quest for DNA was going well. “We even had people call and volunteer to give a sample,” says Doolittle. “They were very cooperative, with few exceptions.” One objection came from a car salesman named Kent Jones. He and his family had lived about half a mile from the Jensens in 1992, but they’d since moved to Becker, Minnesota. He was on the cold case team’s list in any case, but their interest was piqued by an incident that occurred during their investigation.

Jones’s wife called 911 to report a domestic, one of several such calls she’d made in the previous few years. When the police arrived they found her seriously injured with a knife wound. She and her husband claimed she’d fallen against an open dishwasher during a tussle, and impaled herself on a protruding blade. The officers were skeptical. They shared their doubts with the cold case team. “We looked at his file,” says Doolittle, “and saw that he’d met Linda Jensen through his work with the Cub Scouts. And about that time, it would have been June 2000, an old girlfriend of Jones’s called to tell us about a phone conversation she’d had with him around the time of the murder.” The woman claimed that Jones got angry and defensive when she mentioned the crime. “In retrospect that all sounds pretty damning,” Doolittle says, “but it really wasn’t much.” It was enough to make Doolittle go to the Jones home personally though, and what happened there aroused his suspicions further. “At first he denied knowing Linda Jensen, but his wife said, ‘No, no, remember when she brought her son here to get enrolled in the Cubs?’ and he admitted she’d been there. Then I asked him for DNA and he got very upset and refused. His wife kept saying, ‘Why don’t you just do it?’ but he wouldn’t.” Doolittle obtained a search warrant that allowed officers to take the sample. It matched, and on July 14, 2000, Jones was arrested for the murder of Linda Jensen.

“It was big day for us,” says Charlie Jensen. “It seemed like maybe we were coming to the end of it.” Jones couldn’t post bail, and as he sat in jail the investigators assembled little tidbits of fact about him that firmed up their belief in his guilt. They learned that Jones often referred to himself both in conversation and in letters as “The Sheik,” a self-conception that was at odds with his squat, doughy appearance. The frequent domestics that he’d been involved in suggested a short fuse. None of that was evidence, but it fit the hypothesis that investigators had always held about the murder. They theorized that Jones had gained entry to the Jensen home on the basis of some ploy, either a feigned interest in the truck that was for sale or something to do with the Cub Scouts. He’d tried to seduce Linda Jensen, she’d rejected his advances, and he’d become enraged and murdered her.

A few weeks after his arrest his cellmate contacted investigators and claimed Jones had told him he’d stabbed Linda Jensen to death. That was evidence. It was of dubious value, but would become one more obstacle for a defense that had little to offer but the claim, backed up by Jones’s wife, that he’d been home when the murder occurred. They tried to shoehorn Charlie Jensen’s early suspicions about Bob Beard and the investigation of Richard Christy into evidence but the judge ruled it out. The mail woman never testified about what she saw the day of the murder. “I think it was someone turning around in our drive,”says Charlie Jensen. “They may have been looking at a truck that I had for sale, but I don’t believe it had anything to do with Linda’s murder.” The worst blow for the defense came when their attempt to rule out the DNA evidence failed, leaving Jones to explain the proverbial smoking gun.

“People think the presence of DNA is the equivalent of a signed confession,” says Christine Funk, a Stillwater attorney who was called upon by Jones’s legal team for her expertise. “It’s not. Sperm in a vagina is evidence of sexual activity, but it can’t tell you the circumstances surrounding the act, or whether it was consensual.” That was the thread on which Jones’s fate hung at trial. He claimed he and Jensen were having an affair, and that they’d had intercourse the day before the murder. He also denied confessing to his cellmate, who’d earlier taken the stand and detailed Jones’s admissions. Later a juror would tell the public defenders that Jones sealed his own fate on the stand. They’d already seen a picture of a smiling, confident-looking and attractive Linda Jensen, taken not long before she was murdered. It made a vivid contrast to Jones, a 5’7”, 260 pound man whose attempts to portray himself as the Don Juan of the northern suburbs seemed ludicrous. It’s hard to know how much credence the jury gave Jones’s cellmate, but they clearly didn’t buy Jones’s story about having an affair with Linda Jensen. After two days of deliberation they found him guilty.

Joe, now 18, came back to Minnesota to stay just before the trial. Lisa, nine, suffered no permanent damage from the trauma of being present when her mother was killed. The two of them live upstairs in a south Minneapolis duplex with Charlie. Linda and Charlie’s son Andy lives downstairs with his two children. “It’s kind of weird without Linda, but we decided to all pull together and be a family,” says Charlie. “You always hear how a conviction gives closure, but you don’t know what a relief it is until it happens. Being able to put a face to the killer and knowing he’s locked up has really helped us put it aside, and go on with our lives. She’ll never be here for us, and we’re always going to miss her, but by God they got him.”