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.
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