Truth Will Out

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.