Murder of Julie Jensen

Julie Carol Jensen (née Griffin), age 40, died on December 3, 1998, in the Carol Beach neighborhood of Pleasant Prairie, Wisconsin. Prosecutors alleged she was poisoned with ethylene glycol (antifreeze) and then suffocated while barely breathing in the marital bed she shared with her husband, Mark Jensen. Julie and Mark had met in 1981 while both worked or studied in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, and had two sons, David and Douglas, aged 8 and 3 at the time of their mother's death. At the time of her death, Julie worked part-time for the Port Authority in Chicago, and Mark Jensen was a branch manager for a St. Louis-based financial firm in Racine, Wisconsin.

Before her death, Julie Jensen had investigated her husband's behavior, checked his business planner, and photographed a note found there. She wrote a letter addressed to two law enforcement officers, gave it to a neighbor, and instructed that it be handed to police if anything happened to her. In the letter she stated she would never take her own life because of her children, and that she was suspicious of her husband's behavior and feared for her "early demise." She also referenced a brief affair she had had seven years earlier and noted her husband had not forgiven her for it.

At trial, Special Prosecutor Robert Jambois argued that Mark Jensen poisoned and then suffocated his wife. The trial was moved from Kenosha County to Walworth County due to pre-trial publicity. Defense counsel Craig Albee argued that Julie Jensen was depressed, had seen a therapist multiple times, was aware of her husband's affair with a co-worker, and had killed herself while framing her husband. Prosecutors presented evidence that Mark Jensen had discussed poisoning his wife with co-workers and a jailhouse associate, and had searched the internet for poison-related information. The admissibility of Julie Jensen's letter was legally contested under Sixth Amendment confrontation-clause protections, but the Wisconsin Supreme Court permitted its use under the "forfeiture by wrongdoing" doctrine, relying on the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Crawford v. Washington.

On February 22, 2008, a jury convicted Mark Jensen, then 48, of first-degree intentional homicide after more than 30 hours of deliberation. Kenosha County Circuit Court Judge Bruce Schroeder sentenced him on February 27, 2008, to life imprisonment without parole. His sons publicly supported him and asked the judge to grant a parole date.

On December 19, 2013, a federal judge overturned the conviction, finding that use of the letter violated Jensen's constitutional right to confront witnesses, and ordered his release within 90 days. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals upheld this decision on September 8, 2015. Prosecutors moved to retry Jensen in January 2016. A Kenosha judge reinstated the original conviction in September 2017, but Wisconsin's Court of Appeals reversed that decision in February 2020 and remanded the case for a new trial, ruling the letter and a related voicemail would not be admissible. Jensen's second trial began January 9, 2023, before Judge Anthony Milisauskas; he was found guilty on February 1, 2023, and sentenced again to life without parole on April 14, 2023.