AP News, January 10th, 2008
The pathologist who did the initial autopsy on a woman whose husband is accused of killing her says he now believes she was suffocated.
Michael Chambliss, the former Waukesha County medical examiner, testified Tuesday that he had changed his mind since taking the stand Monday in Mark Jensen's murder trial.
Chambliss had said Monday he was uncertain how Julie Jensen, 40, died in 1998, including whether she had been poisoned to death with ethylene glycol, the chemical commonly found in antifreeze.
Special prosecutor Robert Jambois has said that Mark Jensen, 48, had planned the killing for months, doing Internet searches to find Web sites on poisoning.
Defense attorney Craig Albee questioned Chambliss' change of testimony.
"(Monday), you had no opinion about the cause of death," Albee said. "You said, 'I don't have enough information.'"
Chambliss said that was a preliminary view.
"We'll let the jury decide that," Albee said.
Chambliss testified that suffocation started to make sense to him after he examined photos of Julie Jensen dead in her bed.
The pathologist said that signs of smothering, including some hemorrhaging, were consistent with injuries from resuscitation.
But a paramedic in Pleasant Prairie testified that Julie Jensen had no pulse when she was found and appeared to have been dead some time, so no efforts were made to revive her.
Albee argued that Chambliss' testimony was not based on sufficient facts and should be banned from the trial, but his request was denied. That means jurors will be allowed to consider Chambliss' final conclusion that: "If (suffocation) had not occurred, she may not have died."
Julie Jensen was sick for three days before she died. During opening statements, Jambois said when she seemed to be improving at one point, Mark Jensen rolled her on her side and sat on her, pushing her face into a pillow and suffocating her, according to an inmate who said Jensen confided in him in jail.
In other testimony Tuesday, Edward Klug, a former co-worker of Mark Jensen, said he has handwritten notes Klug himself kept on a conversation the two had about a month before Julie Jensen died.
According to the notes, Mark Jensen "kept saying" that his wife was unstable, that he was unhappy in his marriage and that he planned to kill Julie.
"He told me how, if you wanted to get rid of your wife, that you could go to Web sites that would tell you how to poison your wife, how to kill her, how it would not be detectable, how you could use Benadryl, antifreeze. I was fascinated," Klug said.
"He was talking freely, (as if) 'Here I've got a kindred soul that I can talk to about hating my wife,'" Klug said.
Klug maintained that the conversation occurred in 1998 but that he waited years to mention the conversation because he was afraid of Mark Jensen, who was his boss for about six months. He outlined the conversation in his notes in 2002.
"If he was capable of killing his wife, what would he do to me?" Klug asked.
Defense attorney Craig Albee suggested that Klug later added to his notes the details of Jensen talking about killing his wife, a claim Klug denied.
Former co-worker Ronald Wruck said Klug came to his door the morning after Klug and Jensen allegedly talked. Klug told him that he and Jensen discussed ways of killing their wives, Wruck said.
(This version CORRECTS that Klug maintains the conversation between him and Jensen took place in 1998, not 2002.)
