Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan: The Poisonous Truth Behind Julie Jensen's Death

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

In this episode of Body Bags, Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack dissect the chilling case of Julie Jensen. They discuss the intricate dynamics of the Jensen family, the suspicions Julie had about her husband Mark and his fatal intentions towards her, how he slowly killed her, the challenges police faced in building a case against Mark, and the concept of a "dying declaration". Subscribe to Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan : Apple Podcasts Spotify iHeart   Time-codes:  00:25 - Introduction. 01:55 - The complex dynamics of the Jensen family. 08:30 - Julie Jensen's increasing suspicion towards her husband's behavior. 13:10 - Devastating effects of ethylene glycol poisoning. 17:40 - Forensic pathology involved in Julie Jensen's case. 21:15 - Exploring a historical method of murder, burking, potentially used in the Jensen case. 23:55 - Description of the crime scene. 26:55 - The legal concept of a "dying declaration" relevant to Julie's letter. 31:40 - The police interview with Mark Jensen. 33:30 - The toxicologist's testimony. 33:45 - Outro.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Body Bags with Joseph Scott Morgan. Death is a great equalizer and when you're faced with the possibility of it, it compels us to reflect, I think. You see that a lot with people that are faced, unfortunately, with terminal illnesses. But what if you don't have a terminal illness, but yet you have a suspicion that you might die? And I don't mean of old age, that somebody in your world has an end for you. Somebody that you love, that you trust, that you've created a family with, has their sights on possibly killing you. Today, we're going to talk about a woman who, over a period of years and through court proceedings, bore testimony

from the grave against her husband. Today, we're going to talk about the poisoning homicide of Julie Jensen. I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Packs. Joining me today is Dave Mack. Dave is a crime reporter with Crime Online. They always tell us when we go to seminars and these sorts of things as death investigators, one of the base rules is that if you have a homicide, look for some stranger in a dark alley. You don't suspect somebody that you've never met or come across. They always tell you to look at those that are in the inner circle.

And the case that we're talking about on body bags today, boy, talk about being in the inner circle. I'm talking about in such an intimate way that you've got a case where you've got a caregiver that brought about the death of his wife. For years, I would tell folks that if anything violent ever happened to my wife, police are going to look at my library of books and they'll see all the crime books that I've got. They would go ahead and slap their bracelets on and take me downtown. That would be it. In this particular case with Mark Jensen, police immediately, I mean, the investigators, they get on scene and you've got a woman dead in her own home. Who are we going to look at?

There's the husband. We often hear that term rush to judgment. Well, it's not a rush to judgment. It's just the facts of the case are laid out in front of you, and certain evidence has kind of a timestamp on it. In this particular case, we're talking decades. We're talking a quarter of a century before justice can even be meted out. Mark Jensen met Julie Griffin back, and we're talking 1981 here. Julie is working at a Sears department store.

Mark was a student. They were both students in college. Mark graduated. Julie didn't. They moved to this place called Pleasant Grove. Just sounds like a nice place to raise a family. They did have two children. The children were eight and three at the time of Julie's death. We're looking at a relationship that was not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but there was something that Julie did that Mark couldn't let go of. And that's what led to what we're about to talk about. Back to what you'd said earlier, Dave, it's not from an investigative standpoint. I'm not talking about the general public here. That's neighbors and that sort of thing.

For us in the world of investigations, it is not a rush to judgment. It is a need to assess. It's a need to assess and consider all of the possibilities that surround a case. Because when you have an individual that dies in an intimate setting, and we're talking about in one of the prosecutors in the case, you use the term the marital bed, and you can draw anything you want to from that, but that term, the marital bed, it implies, and I know that that's what the prosecutor was getting at, it implies a certain level of intimacy. So, when you're working a case and you think, who would have access to Julie Jensen within her domicile, within her bedroom, on her bed? You don't have any signs at the scene of forced entry or struggle. That's kind of our

benchmark, isn't it? You hear that in every television show. We'd look for those sorts of things, busted out windows and overturned furniture. There's no evidence to that. You have to have the means, you have to have access. You have to have opportunity. I think in a case like Julie's case, you have to be able to control. You have to be able to control the situation. And that goes to this other point that you made about the relationship that they had. This marriage was marked by infidelity. Julia transgressed several years before, and the husband just, he could not get past that. And of course, he wound up being unfaithful as well. And so, you look at that and you think about motivation, who would want to do this, and how much, sometimes the scars, the assessment that you're doing from a forensic standpoint, the trauma is not necessarily

all external that you're looking at. Because people think, you know, when you have a case where somebody is very rageful, in the case of bludgeoning, for instance, they're going to just beat somebody to a bloody pulp with either their hands or they're going to beat them with some heavy object or perhaps they're going to get a knife. Intimate cases that we've covered certainly on body bags where you think about somebody is cut and stabbed multiple times. We talk about things like overkill that doesn't exist in this case, but I would submit, I think, for the listeners to consider this. The way in which Julie died and met her end is as equally horrific. And it's hard to kind of express that to people that are not exposed to poisons, because that's what we're going to talk about,

and other associated factors. It's really hard to take the measure of it when you begin to think what a languishing death this was that Mark subjected her to. Here's what we're really looking at. We both alluded to it. I'm going to throw it out there. Julie Jensen had a two-day affair. Two days. That was it.

And it was with a person that she had a very low opinion of later on. She said not very many kind things about him. She really regretted it. It was just a two-day lapse of judgment that she apologized for, tried to make right, and it just, Mark Jensen wouldn't let it go. For the next several years, he started plotting and planning what he was going to do to get rid of her. Jensen, and when we think about getting on the internet and looking for things, we know how police use that to find out what we've been looking for, what we've been reading, what are our habits. And I don't think of that when I think of the late 90s, the mid and late 90s, I don't at all. I'm so glad you mentioned that because that was striking to me. You know, that happened in these searches that you're referring to. This is back in 1998.

I can only imagine that the people that were involved in this case thought, wow, this is something newfangled. We're using a computer to kind of pry into somebody's life and assess what they were doing. It was new stuff back then, not like today. And that's the thing. So he doing all these searches, I guess he didn't even think for a moment that this could be used against him later on as it was. But bottom line is from the time the affair was discovered, he plotted her demise. And Mark Jensen apparently was not that sly about it either, because Julie fairly quickly started seeing what he was doing.

She noticed changes in his habits, noticed he was doing things different. So she started kind of being a private eye. She started investigating him. She started watching what he was doing. And it got to the point where Mark's telling people that Julie's depressed and is mentally not there. She's telling her best friends, neighbors, that she is not suicidal to the point where she writes a letter. And it is to her neighbor, if anything happens to me, we hear about these in movies and stuff, but this happened in real life. If anything happens to me, I didn't do it to myself.

You got to look at Mark, my husband. When police were investigating, they're trying to figure out, A, how she died, and two, what led up to it. In the fall, she died December 3rd, 1998. But in the fall, in September, Mark Jensen gets drunk at a business conference. He was in financial business. And he gets drunk with this guy, Ed Klug. They start talking about their bad marriages. And Jensen goes further and talks about ways to kill his wife that he has found online that can't be discovered, that he could poison her. He was very specific. Now, they were both drunk, but Ed Klug was like, dude, divorce is an option. And Jensen wouldn't let go. He's not just thinking, he's studying. And he decides ethanol,

glycol, antifreeze. And this is before antifreeze was changed. It used to be kind of a sweet liquid that looked drinkable. And so that was the method that Mark Jensen chose. What would that do to somebody if they were given antifreeze over a period of time? Well, this is kind of a slow roll, if you will, relative to what was going on in their relationship. And you're right, it did have a sweetness to it back then. And here's the thing, they used to put out, there were these warnings with antifreeze, particularly when people would do their own maintenance at home. You know, the days of the so-called shade tree mechanic. Run down and have somebody flush a radiator for you

and then put in new antifreeze and you do oil changes and all that sort of thing. And one of the things that would happen many times is that people would discard antifreeze or leave it lying about. Well, it does have a sweetness. And probably those animals within a neighborhood that we're most attracted to would be dogs. You know, they're driven by their noses. And they come up to this and, boy, they put their tongue to it. And it's got a real sweetness to it. They lap it up and take on a big dose of it at one time.

I mean, you know, it's like eating cake to them probably. It's just very satisfying. And then the next thing you know, you've got a dog. If you're observing the dog, the dog appears, if people can imagine this, to be inebriated. You know, they're inebriated. You know, they're kind of disoriented. They're stumbling. You know, their gait is unsteady, these sorts of things.

And it really impacts them very acute sense when the dogs would take on this much. But here's the thing. The dogs would eventually die. And many people, I think for a long time, were thinking, you know, how in the world did my dog die? Was it some kind of disease that they succumbed to? No, it was actually poisoning. And there are a number of cases out there where people have used or had used antifreeze in the past to poison local animals that were walking through. If you can imagine, people did want dogs in their yard, for instance, are people that were angry at their neighbor. They would put out a bowl of antifreeze mixed

with water or juice or something like that, and they would give it to the dog and the dog would die. They would succumb to it. But in Julie Jensen's case, you've got mark who is slowly poisoning her over a period of time where he's giving her bits of antifreeze that he's introducing actually into glasses of orange juice so it would have been essentially undetectable to the palate that sweetness that's associated with orange juice and you're taking this on and it will over a a period of time, the ethylene glycol, which is the primary ingredient in antifreeze, would begin to build up. It attacks multiple areas within your system. It's devastating to the kidneys in particular and the liver. You'll have individuals that will go into renal failure as a result of it after they have

been given this for a protracted period of time. They just become very toxic. They're always in a stupor if they have it on board and they're being kind of, I don't want to use the term microdose because that implies that it's a very, very minuscule amount because it's not necessarily to the point where it's just a drop. It takes more than simply a drop in order to accomplish this. But as they're being dosed daily by a caregiver, in this case like Mark, they become progressively sicker. And isn't that interesting because this goes to the mindset of a poisoner.

Poisoners traditionally have been portrayed as individuals that are stealthy. They're quiet, many times kind of reserved. They like to be in control of things. And that goes to the heart of being able to have access, right? How could you consistently have access to somebody that you wanted to poison them? Now, yeah, I mean, you could give somebody a big dose of some type of horrible substance like arsenic, perhaps, and they would keel over. But if you didn't want somebody to suspect that it was you and you have access to them daily, you're giving them this while pretending to care for them.

Because as she's getting this substance, she's getting sicker and sicker and sicker. And that actually opens up the door for him to become a sympathetic person. He's a good husband. He's standing there. He's next to her bedside. He's taking care of her. She's feeling bad. And all the while, he's giving her antifreeze. You think of somebody that can get close enough in order to apply some kind of toxin to an individual

and set it up in such a way that you can guarantee that they're going to ingest it, that it will be introduced into their body. But you know, poisoning requires patience. And I think that perhaps Jensen may have run out of patience in this case. He just couldn't wait for his wife to die. Joe, that is probably one of the sickest, saddest things to think about with somebody that is the mother of your children. At this point, somebody you have known for 17 years. You've built a life together.

And you have come to this point in December of 1998 because of a two-day affair that took place seven years before. You've plotted, you've planned, you've researched to find out the best, as you mentioned, stealthy way of killing your spouse and getting away with it. The problem is what Mark Jensen didn't realize is he wasn't the smartest person in the room. It was probably his wife. Julie actually figured out something was going on and she started talking about it to friends just like he drunkenly exposed himself to an acquaintance during a conference julie too had outed him to neighbors saying she suspected he something was afoot keep an eye on him if anything happens to

me and she wrote a letter if anything happens to me it's look at Mark. And when you look at, she died after the antifreeze, Mark got tired of waiting. So he adds Ambien. She's now in the marital bed. She is not dead. Mark decides he's got to get this done. He has got to put her out of her, his misery, actually. And so he suffocates her, which I can't,'t you know oftentimes they'll talk about a knife is such a personal thing to use a personal weapon how about your bare hands what kind of person can actually suffocate kill strangle the life out of somebody that they've built a life with it's a tough thing to assess looking back on it but they came up the, the forensic pathologist did a fantastic job because they had a lot of speculative information to begin with. Because when you look at, let me break it

down this way. When you're doing a toxicology exam relative to the death of someone, we use a standard panel toxicologically, and we draw blood. We draw urine, if there's urine available, if it's in the bladder. We take vitreous fluid, which is from the eye. Many people don't know that. And sometimes we'll take bile if the gallbladder still exists, if it's still in place. And you'll run what's referred to as a standard panel. You're looking for stuff that is common, that you think might have a contributory factor to this person's death. You begin to think about things like opiates.

You think about morphine, cocaine metabolite, benzodiazepine. You even look for salicylates, aspirin, THC, a lot of these things that are kind of part and parcel of the world that we live in and things that people might have access to. You're not going to go in there looking for ethylene glycol. It's just, it's not, I'm not saying that it's not detectable. It's just not something you're going to do on the first pass. And so you have to have other answers. And when they began to take a look at her body, and I'm talking about from an external manifestation, not what was going on internally, she had some kind of what we refer to as postmortem artifacts on kind of the right anterior, which is the front aspect of her chest, her arm, her face. And it was non-distinctive really. But the conclusion

that they came to was she had in fact been smothered. And it's often been stated that smothering is one of the most difficult, traumatically related causes of death to kind of determine. Many times we'll look at with the standard smothering or in smothering, when I'm referring to this, I'm talking about where you have a surface that is either applied to the face or the face is pressed down into, and the airway is essentially occluded at that point in time. You can't breathe through your nose and your mouth. There's not a lot you can look for. You don't have the same pressures associated with that where you're always going to get the little particular hemorrhages in the eye.

But one of the things we'll look for is to say, for instance, that the frenula are intact. Those are those little connective bits of tissue in the upper lip and the lower lip. You can kind of feel that with your tongue. And sometimes you'll get little lacerations in there. We see this with hand smothering with small children. They're fighting against, you know, that primal instinct. But in Julie's case, we had mentioned the antifreeze that she had on board. But, you know, she also had Ambien, which is a sleep aid, which is going to make you groggy.

And in addition to that, she had also been prescribed Paxil at some point in time, which is an antidepressant, anti-anxiety medication. People that have OCD perhaps will be given Paxil. So you've got these kind of substances in her system that are kind of depressing her system, if you will, from a respiratory standpoint. The antifreeze has the effect. It's an alcohol, so it has an effect, that kind of euphoric effect, sleepiness, drowsiness, all those sorts of things that impact us as well. But it just wasn't getting the job done. So, what the forensic pathologists determined is that more than likely, Mark Jensen actually did something called burking. B-U-R-K-I-N-G. It's an old term. And let me kind of give you the history of it because this is quite amazing. used to occur many years ago when people were attempting to kill individuals in order to turn their corpses over to anatomists. And just let that sink in just for a second.

To turn them over to anatomists who would dissect the bodies in the context of medical schools. They wanted healthy cadavers that were free of trauma. Back in years and years ago, you didn't want somebody who'd been run over by a carriage or shot because you couldn't appreciate all of the anatomical points of reference, that sort of thing, because they'd been disrupted. But if you burk somebody, and it actually comes from a guy's name, you sit on their back or you could sit on their chest and literally sit on them. That's what they think that Jensen actually did.

He sat on the right aspect of her, what would be called by physicians, her posterior right chest, which essentially is the right side of her back, and pressed her face into that pillow as her breathing became progressively more and more labored, she succumbed. She succumbed because she couldn't breathe anymore. And this turns out to be a smothering. Beyond the fact that you're bringing up terms such as Birkin and things that will now haunt my nightmares. I have to think, Joe, that Mark Jensen had such a powerful urge to wreak havoc on his wife, the plotting, the planning. And when everything came to an end, he didn't have she wasn't dead and he was left with this. So I'm betting that he had to look up a way to suffocate her without leaving a mark.

Because when I think of strangling, I think of the little piece in the throat, the little bone, that that one gets cracked in a strangling. And then you've got the blood in the eyes, those telltale signs of somebody who's been strangled. So if you do this, as you called it, burking, does the victim then still have those types of marks? There's another term that could be applied here, compression asphyxia. Anatomically, all these areas would be compromised. They're not going to be working at their full capacity. So, let's just think about this for a second. And I've seen the crime scene photos of her there. She's lying on the right aspect of the bed. We all have a particular side, you know, that we choose to sleep on.

There's a nightstand there. She's lying on the right side of the bed, her head turned to the right in this image. And she's got her, the bed covers are pulled up, just covering her waist. Her body was positioned in such such a way that he could have sat down on her because she was really near the edge of the bed. He could have sat down on her as if you were sitting on a chair. And his full weight is going to be compressing down on her chest. What do we require in order to breathe? Well, one of the ways we assess many times if someone is still alive, and you'll see physicians make note of this, they'll say the chest is still rising and falling.

Well, that gives us an idea that they're intaking air and they're expelling air at that point in time. his left hand, if you'll imagine just taking your left hand as his buttocks is placing pressure on her, he's taking his left hand and pressing her head down into the pillow in the mattress so that her nostrils are blocked and her mouth is blocked as well. So not only can her chest not rise and fall, but her airway is blocked as well. So it's almost a guarantee when you've got somebody whose system is depressed like hers was by these agents that she had on board that she's going to die. And in fact, she did. If you were faced with your own mortality, realizing that there is a probability that you're going to die, perhaps, at someone's hand other than your own,

when faced with the possibility that you might die, perhaps, at someone's hand other than your own. When faced with the possibility that you might die, what would you do, particularly if you suspected that someone had you in their sights? In Julie Jensen's case, she penned a letter. She penned a letter and gave it to her neighbor. Dave, we don't come across cases like this very often no in this particular case that letter became a big issue in court because she wrote it and it was considered and and i guess i mean joe you've dealt with this i'm sure with forensics and trials and things like that that when somebody writes this down okay of what they suspect and they're trying to be clear, they're not out and out accusing anybody of anything, just merely saying, if anything happens to me, I am not suicidal, and I would not take my own life. You need to look at Mark, my husband.

And that's exactly what she did. There's a concept in law that's referred to as a dying declaration. And most of the time that applies to, let me give you a for instance, let's say an individual has been traumatized in some way to the point where they suspect that they are dying and let's just, I don't know, they're riding in the back of an ambulance and they make this spontaneous comment that so-and-so did this to me. And then they wind up succumbing to that injury. Well, that's weighted in a particular way in the eyes of the court. Here's the caveat.

If you don't die, that statement doesn't have the same value. All right. So, that's kind of an interesting little side note. It's called a dying declaration. And the old legal way of looking at this, and this is kind of an interesting statement, is that – probably going to get the phraseology wrong, but it's something paraphrased like this. An individual does not want to go to God with a lie in their mouth. That sounds very early English common law, doesn't it? So it's the litmus test. You're not going to lie right before you die because you're going to face judgment for that.

So if you're going to put a truth meter to it, that statement suddenly becomes has more validity to it than if you're just in healthy condition, you make the statement. All right. So when she wrote that letter, it had some weight to it. It certainly had some weight. And we were talking, Dave, and you had mentioned that this happened in 1998. And you think this guy wasn't he wasn't hooked up on charges for her death until what was it, 2002? Is that what that was? It was 2002.

And then he didn't stand trial in the first trial until 2008. And that letter was actually admitted as evidence at that point in time. It was a big part of the investigation, Joe. The detective on scene, the day they came to the house, Julie Jensen had not been quiet in the months leading up to her death. She actually had left messages for the police saying she was afraid her husband was trying to kill her. And the detective had been on vacation for a week. When he afraid her husband was trying to kill her. And the detective had been on vacation for a week. When he got back, he listens to his voicemails and lo and behold, here's Julie Jensen saying, I'm really afraid my husband's going to kill me. And lo and behold, they get a call. Julie Jensen has died in her bed. Just because somebody says,

I think my husband's trying to kill me. She could be trying to frame him. And police are not going to just take that and say, oh, we got to get him now. They're going to do what anybody would do and say, well, maybe there's more afoot. And actually, that's what Mark Jensen's team tried to say, that Julie Jensen was so depressed and everything else that she wanted to commit a suicide. And it's like the movie Gone Girl, make Mark Jensen look guilty of murder. Yeah, try to blame him for this in advance. And this kind of post-mortem framing, if you will, which is a fascinating construct in and of itself. Are you going to that link?

And she had made no secret about telling people within her circle that she felt in danger. But, you know, the sad thing about this, this comes down to a mother's love. She had two children. And by all accounts, she was a fantastic mama. And she did not want to walk away from her family. This creation, this familial unit that she had created along with Mark, after all of these years, she had two sons that she was very proud of that were the center of her universe, and she did not want to leave them. And just imagine that.

If you're a mother, you have the sense that you're in danger, but yet you've got these two young kids, right? They might be in danger as well, perhaps, that if they're left with this guy, because if he'll kill the mom, he might kill them as well. She wanted to be there to protect them. And they were very young when all of this, they're grown men obviously now, but when this first occurred back in 1998. They were eight and three. Yeah, they were eight and three. She had to be there for them. You have this dynamic

within the family that you don't want to she doesn't want to leave them she has to be there to protect them and she had even said she had even said on a couple of occasions that he's dangerous she had an awareness of danger and she didn't just say it to the next door neighbor vis-a-vis this letter she had said it to a number of people including this detective that she left a message for and that's the, again, you and I have talked about a couple of times from the very beginning, because she had spoken out to her inner circle of friends. She had reached out to police that they were looking at Mark. But you can't just arrest somebody because somebody said they might do something.

And that's why they built a case. It actually took a couple of months before they ever actually sat down with Mark Jensen and interviewed him. That was like March the following year. And in that interview, which you can see online, they're pushing and trying to get him to admit because the detective is like, dude, really? How did it happen? How did she die? And Mark Jensen stated his story. Hey, man, she had been sick. She was sick that morning and she just died. It was only after they found out that he had been having an affair with Kelly Labonte. And by the way, that affair began in September of 1998.

Julie dies December 3rd. Additional little sidebar. Kelly Labonte entered into a sexual relationship with Mark Jensen two weeks after she was married. She was a newlywed when she began having a sexual relationship with Mark Jensen, whose wife turns up dead three months later, and then he eventually marries Kelly Labonte. So there was a lot going on in this story in the interpersonal relationships that had police swirling, trying to put together everything in an order they could take to trial. And as you mentioned, they did have to do two trials.

The first one, it was in 2008. And that letter from the grave, it became a focal point of that first trial. It did. And I think that in the second trial, they were not able to utilize that letter. But when you have this physical evidence, bringing this back around to the physical evidence, you have the evidence that there was actually antifreeze in her stomach when she was autopsied. And the toxicologist made a fantastic point from the stand even. He said, that is not a substance that you would expect to find in someone's system, let alone immediately in

their stomach. And that implies that they had been dosed in the short term. The toxicologist went on to describe that she had been being dosed for a while. So this was kind of an ongoing progression that was portrayed in court. And they were able to put together this timeline. You combine that with the idea that she had, in fact, been smothered. It turns out that they didn't need the letter. But I think the letter revealed a lot.

I'm Joseph Scott Morgan, and this is Body Bags. This is an iHeart Podcast.