Truth Will Out

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.”


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