The Fight Against Crime: Notes From the Front : No Glitter in This Couple’s Detective Work

Forget all that hooey on late night television about the glamorous lives of husband-and-wife private eye teams. Martie and John C. Jensen Sr. are the real thing, and these gray-haired gumshoes don’t carry guns, spin the wheels of flashy sports cars, or employ engaging, case-cracking house servants.

This is the real world, where the Jensens live in a trailer park, drive pickup trucks--one with 143,000 miles on it--and listen to country and Western music. They carry pictures of their grandchildren in their wallets. They go by the book.

“I haven’t shot anybody this week,” John Jensen said, joking over coffee recently at the Van Nuys courthouse. “We haven’t broken into anybody’s house and gone through their garbage. We have had guns pointed at us within the past year.”

Husband-and-wife private investigators, while fodder for Hollywood, actually are a rarity. The Jensens say that as far as they know, they are the only licensed husband-and-wife team currently working in Los Angeles.

Martie, 57, and John, 53, fell for each other while investigating a fatal crash involving an 18-wheeler on the Grapevine for an insurance company. They married in 1979 and started their own firm, Jensen & Jensen Professional Investigations.

Her photographic memory complements his by-the-numbers style perfectly, they say. The Jensens present a united and non-threatening front with their clear blue eyes and kindly faces that invite people to spill secrets.

These days, the Jensens specialize in death penalty cases, working under contract for the offices of the Alternate Defense Counsel, the court-appointed lawyers who handle cases when the public defender’s office has a conflict of interest because it already represents a co-defendant or witness.

Unlike many of the lawyers she works for, Martie Jensen approves of the death penalty. She just thinks the authorities should prove their case first.

She’s made it difficult for them at times.

A death penalty case is complicated, she says. It arrives in cartons, rather than in the binders known as “murder books.” The Jensens retrace the police detectives’ steps, re-interviewing witnesses, looking for holes in their stories. They ask the questions that weren’t asked by police, and follow up leads their clients give them, playing the role of debunker.

Jensen & Jensen has handled about 70 capital cases, and none of their clients have been executed. “Right now, we haven’t even got anybody on Death Row,” John Jensen said.

And that is impressive considering the stacked deck capital murder cases often present.

But in several capital cases Jensen & Jensen has handled, the client has actually walked. Their work has contributed to five acquittals and three dismissals. The client list includes some notorious defendants.

There’s Harvey Rader, an Englishman and Reseda car dealer who’d been accused in 1988, after a six-year investigation, of killing four members of a Northridge family, whose bodies were never found.

“He’s free now. I talked to him the other day,” Martie Jensen said.

Then there’s Dr. Richard Boggs, a Glendale neurosurgeon convicted of conspiring with two friends to murder a stranger and collect a $1.5-million insurance policy after claiming the dead man was one of the friends, a partner in Just Sweats, an Ohio clothing company.

More recently, the Jensens worked on the defense of Father David Dean Piroli, the Simi Valley priest accused of stealing more than $50,000 from parish collection plates. He contended another priest did it, and the jury acquitted him on one count and was hung in favor of acquittal on another. Ventura County prosecutors decided earlier this month not to retry him.

And now, Martie Jensen is defending Mary Ellen Samuels, 45, facing the death penalty on charges of two counts of murder for financial gain. She is accused of hiring a hit man to kill her husband, collecting $500,000 worth of insurance, then hiring others to kill the original hit man.

“I like her,” is all Martie Jensen will say about Samuels.