True Crime Campfire - The Letter: The Murder of Julie Jensen, Pt 1

Episode Date: March 20, 2020

We don’t write them quite as often as we used to, but a well-crafted letter can be a real treasure. There’s something intimate about opening an envelope addressed to you and unfolding the paper inside to find the letter writer’s unique handwriting, unique voice, little drawings. Plus anything they might have dropped into the envelope as an extra surprise—a pressed flower, a photograph, a folded up twenty dollar bill. Letters can carry gossip, jokes, professions of undying love…and of course, letters can carry secrets. And in the story we’re about to tell you, a letter was the key to unlocking a mystery so dark, so poisonous, that no one who read it would ever be quite the same again. Sources:ABC's "20/20," Episode "A Murder Foreseen"https://murderpedia.org/male.J/j/jensen-mark.htmCBS's "48 Hours," Episode "The Letter"Follow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail] a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. We don't write them quite as often as we used to, but a well-crafted letter can be a real treasure. There's something intimate about opening an envelope addressed to you and unfolding the paper inside to, find the letter writer's unique handwriting, unique voice, little drawings. Plus, anything else they might have dropped into the envelope as an extra surprise. A pressed flower, a photograph, folded up $20 bill. Letters can carry gossip, jokes, professions of undying love, and of course letters can carry secrets. And in the story we're about to tell you, a letter was the key to unlocking a mystery so dark, so poisonous, that no one who read it would ever be quite the same again. This is the letter, the murder of Julie Jensen.

So campers, we're in Pleasant Point, Wisconsin, December 3, 1998. A 39-year-old stockbroker named Mark Jensen called 911 to report that his 40-year-old wife, Julie, was dead. she'd been sick for a few days he said he'd left her alone in the bedroom to rest and when he went in to check on her he found her not breathing no pulse police and paramedics responded to find julie dead she was wearing a pink t-shirt and a pair of panties and she was sprawled kind of awkwardly on the bed calf on her stomach with her face smashed up against the mattress in this very unusual unnatural position it was almost like when you see somebody with their face pressed up against a window you know oh yeah that look at her face pressed up against a window you know oh yeah that look at her her face was really like smashed into the mattress. So something about that felt off to them right away, so much so that they page the district attorney. First of all, we've got a 40-year-old woman with no prior history of health problems and women like that don't usually just drop dead for no apparent reason. So when the deputy medical examiner arrived, Mark explained that Julie had been depressed and had just started taking two new medications, Paxol and Ambien. So he thought

maybe this was a drug interaction, and he told them that she had had an odd reaction to the Paxil a couple of nights before. It was all really sad. Julie had been a loving wife, a mother of two boys, she was only 40 years old? What had caused her death at such a young age? Was it a natural death? Suicide? Was something else going on? But let's put a pin in that for a bit and get some background on Mark and Julie Jensen. They'd grown up in the same town, gone to the same high school as kids in Wisconsin. Julie was kind, thoughtful, intelligent, gentle, so gentle, in fact, that some people have described her as delicate, which I think means that she just had a soft way about her,

you know, kind of soft-spoken and kind-hearted. Mark, on the other hand, was driven, ambitious, confident, he was handsome, he was smart, and he struck people as a young man about to take the world by storm. So one of these people that kind of comes in like a hurricane. They didn't date in high school, but the summer after they graduated in 1976, that was when they met up at a party and got together. And they were headed, luckily enough, to the same college. And once they got there, their relationship really started to blossom and get serious. So much so that they got married before they even graduated in a beautiful wedding ceremony on, oddly enough, April 15th.

Which, for those of you outside the U.S., that's tax day. Which is just, if you ask me a weird day to get married, like most of the guests were probably just sitting there worrying like, did I get everything turned in on time? You know, am I going to get my refund fast? And while they're up there saying their eternal vows. But given what would eventually happen, it does actually seem kind of apropos.

Because Mark was a dude who liked money. And after college, he began a career as a stockbroker. Julie dropped out of college after the wedding and began a career as a bookkeeper in the, the same industry with Mark, not at his company, but in the same field. And six years later, they had their first child, a little boy, and after the baby was born, that was when the first cracks began to show in the relationship. And this happens a fair amount in relationships. If there are weak spots in a relationship, then adding stress is not going to do anything usually except

make them weaker. And few things cause more stress, of course, than a new baby. Although, obviously there's a lot of joy in this as well, but there is no denying that for most people, a new baby is a stressful situation. You're sleep deprived. You're trying to figure out parenthood, you know, especially if it's a first time, you know, child for you. And so if you have preexisting issues, then chances are it ain't going to help, right? And Mark had always been very concerned with appearances. He wanted to have a lot of money. He wanted to have fancy things. He wanted nicer things in fact than his friends and neighbors had you know got get your priorities straight right campers by the time they had the baby mark's ambition had kicked into overdrive

and so he showed little if any interest in being a dad and julie later told family that mark had confessed after the baby was born that he'd never really wanted kids oh my god yeah echoes of our boy scott peterson right remember how he told a family member he was kind of hoping for infertility when Lacey got pregnant, right? And I'm not judging anybody for not wanting kids. I don't want any myself, but that would be a thing that you'd maybe want to tell your partner before you, you know, get her pregnant and have a kid with her. Useful information. So why he didn't think to tell her that before he married her, I can't imagine, but there you go. He was probably just thinking of other things, I guess. Oh, that's a minor detail, Whitney.

Yeah, right. You can't expect someone to talk to their spouse about expectations. sure of course not they want to fuck without a condom goodness gracious dirty all right and you know julie had initially admired mark's ambition and his strong work ethic and his kind of hard charging business boy type attitude but now you know she's got this new baby she felt like a single mom and that was all it took really for a rift to begin forming between them and one common stressor with the birth of a new child, in addition to everything else, you know, financial worries and never getting any sleep and having that crying to deal with and everything, is that one parent is often the primary caregiver. Now, in heterosexual couples, this is often the mom, though

that's certainly not the case in every family. I know plenty of families where, you know, it's the other way around or where it's equal, but, you know, it does happen certainly pretty often that one parent, usually the mom, is the more involved day-to-day parent. But oftentimes, the new mom is wrapped up in caring for the baby, which is understandable and necessary, and sometimes the other spouse can start to feel a little bit neglected, maybe even resentful. Now, I'm not saying this is good or fair or right, I'm just saying it can happen, especially when it's a first child, I think, right?

So, you know, marriage therapist will tell you that this comes up a lot in couples counseling, you know, ever since we had the baby, I don't get any attention from you or whatever, which I'm sure just makes that parent want to like slap the other one up the side of the head and say, well, you could probably give me a little more help then. Yeah. Maybe it'd be better, right? If I'm constantly paying attention to the baby, maybe it's because I don't have any help with the baby. Maybe it's because I'm not getting any help.

Right. And Mark definitely was not helping. So I don't know if that was the problem in Mark's case or not. it may have been or it may have just been that he got so obsessed with making money and getting ahead in his career that he just lost interest in everything else including his wife and child I mean we know he didn't want that baby in the first place but whatever the reason the distance between mark and Julie started to expand and instead of a family unit it felt Julie like they were roommates at this point mark just wasn't plugged in at all and he even refused to stop smoking

around this newborn baby like he'd come home he'd light up a cigarette and julie would have to take the baby outside instead of him going outside to smoke oh yeah i know is that just bananas like are you serious this is the most baffling thing i've ever heard every single person i know that smokes does not do so in front of their child and knows that if you're going to make the choice to smoke you're the one that goes outside obviously absolutely it's so gross and secondhand smoke is so bad for you especially for brand new little baby lungs for god's sake what are you doing because that smoke sticks around for up to like five hours oh my god are you serious that's scary so even worse than that julie told family that she didn't feel like mark had bonded with

their son and by the way i actually heard a new mom say that about her baby once and it was really startling. I think it was the first time I'd ever heard like a parent admit to that, you know? And I'm sure it happens sometimes. But I just had always thought that was just automatic, like at least in a biological birth that you just bond immediately. But apparently, at least for some parents, they don't. And she said it so casually too. It was so odd. We were like a New Year's party. And she was just like, yeah, you know, I thought that I would feel this amazing rush of love and bonding. And, you know, it just didn't happen. And it just kept not happening. And then I think she realized that we were all kind of looking at her like, oh, my God.

It wasn't necessarily what she was saying so much as the casualness with what she was saying it. And then she kind of backpedaled a little bit. And she was like, oh, but he's my sweetheart and I love him. And like, okay, I hope so. Yikes. Anyway, so Mark was becoming more and more distant, staying later and later at the office, et cetera, et cetera. And he was also viciously critical of Julie. Like, he expected her to do all the household chores, all the child care by herself, even on weekends,

despite the fact that she was still working. She was not a stay-at-home mom. So, you know, that makes it even worse, right? And he criticized her every move. Her housework was subpar. Her cooking wasn't good enough. By the way, did you all see that jack wagon on Dr. Phil a few years ago who rated his wife's meals on like an A to D scale?

Oh, my God. Like an A-plus meal was like Cocoa-Van with a wine pairing. And I swear to God, he even did the flipping pluses and minuses, like an anal-or-tentive elementary school teacher or something. And it went all the way down to a D-minus. I guess he didn't want to take it all the way down to an F because he wouldn't want to be abusive or anything, right? But a D-meal in his world was one that came out of a box. So if he married me, he'd be sadly disappointed because I'm all about the stov-top stuffing and, you know, all that. And thank God my husband does the cooking in our house.

Or we'd be like O-Ding on hamburger helper and shake and bake and stuff. Because apparently my knowledge of boxed foods also ended in 1989. I think they still have hamburger helper though, right? Definitely. So anywho, Julie was lonely. I mean, of course she was. She had a new baby. She was sleep deprived.

She had a husband who wasn't present in any sense of the word. And I imagine she was just feeling completely overwhelmed. Yeah. So it shouldn't surprise anybody to hear that once she went back to work, it didn't take her long to strike up a friendship with a co-worker named Perry. Uh-oh. Yeah. Perry was a new dad, so the two of them bonded over that. They talked about their babies and all the joys and pitfalls of figuring out parenthood for the first time.

And eventually, they talked about their relationship troubles. Julie poured out all her angst about Mark and Perry was a good listener. He really seemed to care. And for Julie, who had been feeling like a single mom with a mean critical roommate who was either away at work or tearing her down, this was like rain on the desert. I bet. And in 1991, one weekend while Mark was away on business, Julie invited Perry over for dinner. And I'm about to hurt Whitney's feelings because this was the year I was born. Why are you like this?

Why? Why, why, why must you continually remind me that I'm ancient? I'm just going to lean into it. I'm just going to be the Oracle, the ancient Oracle. I'm going to start, like, licking my thumb and wiping schmuts off your face whenever you come in this. Oh, perfect. I'm pitching your little true crime campfire high chair. Oh, my God, I'm ancient. Oh, my God. We need to start sticking stickers on high chairs. Everything.

We must have a T. CCC logo on everything now. We've already got the wood chipper planned. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I don't do it on purpose, Whitney. I do love you.

Oh, the hell you don't. I love you, too. It's all good. So, anyway, Julie and Perry got cozy on the couch after dinner. More bonding, more deep conversation. And, of course, shocker of shockers, they ended up in bed. Julie and Mark's bed. Mm.

Ouch. Not great. Not great. Perry stayed the whole weekend. For Julie, it was giving into the temptation to soak up the kind of attention and affection she hadn't been getting from Mark. This is so not the best way to deal with that situation, though. And Julie realized that almost immediately. After the hormone-induced haze had dissipated, and she looked at the situation in the cold, light of day, she felt horrible guilt.

She quit her job Monday morning and broke it off with Perry in no uncertain terms. Wow. That was it. And she confessed to Mark. She felt awful. She wanted to make things right between them. In some ways, I think her one weekend stand was a cry for help. For Mark to see how lonely she was feeling and work with her to fix it.

Yeah. Again, extremely ill-advised, in my opinion, but I think from a psychological standpoint, that's what she was doing. I agree. And I also agree it's a terrible idea, but I can understand it. You know, I mean, not only is she still in that postpartum kind of hormonal thing, but she's got a guy who's just, like we said, like her roommate more than her husband. And she's feeling a lot of coldness from him. I'm not saying it's right. I don't think it is at all.

But, yeah, I understand it. Yeah. Yeah, you can understand it from a psychological standpoint, but we don't condone it. And if her hope was that Mark would realize their marriage was in trouble and make a good faith effort to help fix it, she was sorely disappointed. Mark was furious. As, of course, any cheated on spouse would be. Oh, yeah, I'd be beyond furious, no doubt. And Julie apologized again and again.

And she begged him to go to counseling with her. But within six months of her encounter with Perry, she realized they'd made no progress. Mark simply would not or could not forgive her. And, you know, sometimes you can't. I mean, sometimes people just can't get to that place of forgiveness when we're talking about infidelity. I mean, I love my husband more than anything.

And I would like to think that there's nothing he could do that I couldn't forgive him for eventually. But I don't know. I mean, it would be hard because it would feel like he wasn't who I thought he was. Oh, totally. That would be the hard thing about that. So, you know, I mean, you can't blame him for being mad, but at some point, you have to decide, like, is this going to be a life sentence or not, you know? Yeah, and that's where Mark's head seemed to be.

So after seven years of marriage, Julie filed for divorce. And this is the puzzling. and I'm sure frustrating part for Julie. Although Mark had shown no signs of love for Julie, no willingness to work on the marriage, no forgiveness, he was adamant that he would crush her if she left him. Oh, my God. He told her, if you leave me,

I'll make sure you never see your son. I'll make you look crazy. Wow. I know what to say to the court to do it. and I'll make sure they know about your infidelity. The judge will give me full custody and you won't be in your son's life at all. Jeez, Louise. It's important to note, by the way, that this was the first time Mark had shown the slightest bit of interest in his son.

Normally, he wouldn't even look up from the Wall Street Journal to watch the kid take his first steps. By now, he realized their child, was a valuable tool he could use to manipulate and control Julie. And she believed he'd make good on every threat. He wasn't the type to make threats with no teeth. So, Julie withdrew her petition for divorce. Yeah, and an interesting little side note, what he was threatening, that I'll tell the court about your infidelity.

That does not quite have the teeth now that it used to. But back in the day, that would have, often been enough for someone to lose custody of their children. Nowadays, you can go in and say, well, this person had an affair, and it may or it may not have an impact, you know, but back then it definitely did. And it's so creepy to me that he threatened to make her look crazy. And it sounds like something that my dickhead ex-boyfriend would have done. And just to give you a quick illustration of what I'm talking about, one summer, we were on a break from the relationship, and he invited me over to talk things through, right? But once I go,

got there, he didn't seem to want to talk about like us at all. He just kept steering the conversation towards mutual friends. And it seemed like he was trying to get me to badmouth people. So finally, I just got fed up and said, look, if you're just going to be weird, I'm going to go. And the next day, I found out from a mutual friend, I shit you not, that before I got there, he had taped a mini cassette recorder to the back of the couch with duct tape so he could catch me talking shit about our mutual friends and use the tape to blackmail me into like letting him have all our friends. Jeez, oh, Pete. Yeah, that is a true story about my Dickwad ex-boyfriend.

And it very, it was the first thing I thought of when I read about Mark threatening, you know, to make her look crazy in court. Oh, my God. That kind of premeditated, creepy narcissistic nonsense. Yeah, there are a lot of steps to get there. Absolutely. And I completely agree with Julie that he would have done it, too. He would have tried it.

Whether it would have worked, that's a big question. But in the headspace she was in, I think she certainly believed it would. Right. So soon after that, some bizarre stuff started happening. Mark and Julie started finding pictures around their property. On Mark's truck, stuck under the windshield wipers, scattered around the backyard and the garage, which they often left open. Then later, in the house. Yikes.

This was one of those neighborhoods where people don't lock their doors. Oh, my God. This shit. PSA. Lock your doors, guys. It takes two seconds. If you are listening to this show and you don't lock your doors, what are you doing? I know.

At this point, there's no excuse. Lock your damn doors. And so these weren't innocuous pictures. We're not talking puppies and kittens. These were graphic, pornographic pictures. Oh, my God. Most were close-ups of men receiving oral sex from a blonde woman. The people in the pictures were always positioned so you couldn't quite see the woman's face,

just her blonde hair, which was the same color and length as Julie Jensen's. Oh, my God. Now, Julie swore the pictures weren't of her, and they weren't, but that didn't matter. The message was clear. Someone wanted to degrade her, and possibly taunt Mark, too. So this was humiliating for both of them, and soon it got worse. Someone started calling the house relentlessly and hanging up without saying anything. Julie was feeling terrorized, and Mark felt certain the culprit was Perry, Julie's rejected lover.

And eventually, they reached the end of their rope, and they filed a complaint with the police, alleging that Perry was responsible for the harassment. Mark figured Perry was doing this to psych him out, basically, to flaunt the fact that he'd been with Mark's wife. And I've actually seen that happen in a few different cases where, like, the wife will be sleeping with a lover and the lover will call and say, I had your wife last night, you know, weird stuff like that. So the cops talked to Perry and he denied any responsibility for the pictures and calls. I had nothing to do with this. I have no idea what you're talking about. talking about, et cetera, et cetera. But the cops warned him, look, dude, we're just saying, you need to leave these people alone.

Do not contact Julie or Mark. But Perry didn't listen. Oh, for God's sake, Perry. He had those worms in his brain. Yeah, brain worms. He was in love with Julie. And soon, she got to. a letter from him. I love you. I want to be with you. Please talk to me. Oh, my God, dude.

Dumbass. Seriously. The cops come to you and tell you to stop contacting someone and your first reaction is to write them a love letter? Good plan, guy. It's like, okay, so, sir, we're aware of what you've been doing. You're going to be in trouble if you keep it up. Don't do it. No problem, officers. He sits right down and he writes the letter. Good job. So Mark and Julie reported the letter to the police and they issued Perry, who seems genuinely unhinged at this point, a citation for harassment. And interestingly enough, a common enemy can often be a powerful unifier. And I'm pretty sure we've talked about this in a previous episode. I mean, that is basically the plot of Independence Day, right? Aliens attack. Yeah, it was the Liz Golier episode we talked about this. and suddenly all the nations of the world are singing kumbaya and working together

and I'm thinking that's actually probably what we need right now just to fix everything just one little not too scary alien attack uh-huh nothing too serious just a couple flying saucers and a little bit of pee-poo-pew and you know maybe we would be all hands across America and come together and stop acting like dill holes to each other all the time I'm just saying if there are any alien campers if any of you have managed to have into Apple Podcasts or you know something like that and listen and if you have a universal translator and you can understand what I'm saying take note okay just don't hurt anybody we just need your help to give the illusion that we're in danger so that we can stop being such a bunch

of dumbasses or even better maybe we could get a Kickstarter going for like um what do they call it the conspiracy theorist false flag operation isn't that what Alex Jones calls it a false flag alien attack. So campers, y'all could help make some flying saucers out of like styrofoam plates and silver spray paint and string, you know, like, and we can just do a war of the world's type of thing, which would probably work just as well. And plus then you don't have to deal with aliens. I'm just going to run it up the ladder at the UN just in case, you know, they probably don't have a better plan. What do y'all think? I'm just saying if you've got a better plan, you tell me, because I think it might work. So unfortunately, despite how beautifully this worked in independence,

Day, a common enemy in the person of ex-lover Perry didn't seem to do anything for Mark and Julie. Maybe it's because they needed Will Smith involved. Or Bill Pullman, you know, somebody from Jeff Goldblum even, anybody from Independence Day. So their marriage continued to deteriorate. And in 1995, in the midst of all this tension, while if we care to remind ourselves once again, I was graduating from high school, starting college, and Katie was four Mark and Julie had another little boy and Mark had always been controlling he did his little white glove inspections

of her housework when he came home from work and stuff like that but Mark's controlling and critical behavior got so much worse after that second baby was born first of all his standards for housekeeping in child care were impossible and also he made Julie wear a cordless phone on a holster when she was outside gardening

so she couldn't even mow the lawn without having a phone there and this was before everybody had cell phones so she just had to bring the cordless phone out with her in a holster because he couldn't stand God forbid 30 seconds should go by and he doesn't know where she is right he kept track of the mileage on her car

and he'd like interrogate her if it didn't match up with where she said she'd been and you know if a friend would ask her hey can you help me pick something up for the school event or whatever Julie would have to say oh I'm sorry I can't checks my mileage. And if that were a friend of mine, I'd be like, okay, got it.

So when are we killing him in his sleep? Let's do this. I'm kidding. Obviously, violence is wrong. But I would definitely say, like, so you're leaving him when? Like, let's go get you packed. Because that kind of behavior, not good. That is a huge red flag for an abuser.

That kind of controlling, micromanaging behavior. And he also recorded her phone conversations, which is just creepy. and he isolated her from her family like if they called and he could get away with saying Julie's busy right now she can't talk to you he would do it and sometimes she'd be sitting right there for that too

so she'd have to watch him tell her mom or dad or her sister or whoever oh she can't come to the phone right now oh that kind of controlling crap I just have zero patience for and then when she did talk to them he would sit right there just listening so she'd be trying to have a normal conversation

with one of her family members and Mark would just be right there staring at her with the face like a slapped ass just taking it all in it's like you're eating a bad clam just staring like what are you saying to him Julie I hate this guy

yeah this is where I'm going to have to bring up the subreddit I'm obsessed with again surviving infidelity so this kind of practice is common for betrayed spouses yeah think I need access to all your social media and your phone, and I need to be able to know where

you are at all times. And here's the thing, campers. Is that really what you want for the rest of your life? You want to play hall monitor with someone you're supposed to spend forever with? Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. If you're to the point of needing to track every single interaction that your spouse is having after a betrayal, maybe it's time. to shut it down.

Relationships, more often than not, don't end because both parties don't love each other anymore. They end because the people can't find a way forward together anymore. And this is why people get trapped in toxic, not necessarily abusive situations. They think, well, I still love them. So it must be right to stay together. Yeah. Or it still hurts to think of leaving them.

That's a fallacy. you can love someone that isn't good for you. It hurt to leave my abusive asshole ex-boyfriend. Like, it's going to hurt, most likely. Yeah. And this relationship in the story isn't exactly like that, but I did want to get on my soapbox for a moment to dole out some relationship advice.

You enjoy it, though, and you get at it too. Oh, thanks. Yeah, you can't let your partner turn one mistake into a life sentence on the one hand. And on the other side of it, look, if you're micromanaging somebody's every move because you're afraid that if you don't do that, they're going to leave you, then all you're doing is making it more likely that they're going to leave you because nobody can stand to live into that kind of suffocating bullshit.

It's just oppressive. It's miserable. I know I've been there. Don't do it. So, anyway, Mark also kept Julie's family from talking to her whenever he could. And remember, the number one tool of an abuser is isolation. an abuser wants to keep you away from your support system because they don't want you to have a support system. And it gets to a point after a while where you go through such hell when you try and defy them that it's just not worth the fight, you know,

and you just, to avoid the argument and to avoid the verbal, emotional, physical, whatever abuse you're going to get, you just stop talking to those people. So then you're in a situation where all you have is your abuser. Right. And the only voice in your head is theirs. and the damage that that can do to your self-esteem,

I mean, you can imagine. It's truly, of course, scary. So Julie felt isolated and Julie felt trapped, and she knew Mark would make good on his threats if she tried to leave him. He would expose her as an adulteress. He would make her look crazy. He'd take her boys away.

She'd never get to see them. She believed at all, and I think she was right to. And then, in the summer of 1998, Mark began a flirtation with a new coworker at his office. A young woman named Kelly Label Now, it started as banter around the office, but as these things often do, it soon progressed to flirty emails and then sexually explicit emails. So we'll leave it there for part one campers, but because we release both halves of an episode on the same day, go right ahead and listen to Part 2 now if you want, or save it for later, whatever fries your corn dogs. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire.

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