The call came in at around 4:00 in the afternoon. Charlie’s voice was shaking as he told the dispatcher he had just found his wife murdered. When officers arrived at the house in Big Lake, he was waiting outside, pale and frantic. He explained that he had come home from work like usual and found his young daughter still in her playpen, wearing the same clothes she had been in that morning when he left.
His nine-year-old stepson was there too, just back from school, and he said he hadn’t seen his mother all day. Charlie said he had called the house several times from work, but Linda never picked up. He assumed she was just busy. Then he walked to the bedroom.
When he opened the door, he saw her lying on the floor, partially covered by a bedspread. A large knife was sticking out of her chest, straight through the fabric. Linda Halverson was thirty-nine years old. She and Charlie had remarried the year before, nearly twenty years after their first wedding had fallen apart.
They had a baby daughter together, and Linda’s youngest son from another relationship lived with them too. It was supposed to be their fresh start. When police removed the bedspread, they found that Linda had no clothes on. Her body was covered in stab wounds, and the knife had been taken from her own kitchen.
But the medical examiner determined that the cause of death was strangulation. The killer had choked her first, then stabbed her repeatedly. There were also signs of sexual assault, and investigators recovered biological material from her attacker. But in 1992, DNA testing wasn’t yet widely available, so they couldn’t use it to identify anyone.
The estimated time of death was between 8:00 and 10:00 that morning, just a few hours after Charlie had left for work. Linda’s older son was at school by then, so she had been home alone with the baby. Police found no signs of forced entry. No signs of a struggle, either.
It looked like Linda had let her killer in willingly. The only thing missing from the house was the bedding from her bedroom. Investigators believed the killer had sexually assaulted her on the bed, then took the sheets because he was afraid they might contain evidence. Everything pointed to someone who knew Linda personally and hated her deeply.
He had stabbed her many times after she was already dead and had pinned the bedspread to her body with the knife. From the very first hours, detectives took a close look at Charlie. He had a history of alcoholism, and he and Linda had spent many years apart before remarrying. What raised even more red flags was that while speaking with detectives, he said, almost casually, “By the way, you’ll probably find my fingerprints and DNA on the knife.
” He explained that he had touched the murder weapon, the blanket, and Linda herself when he found her body. Detectives thought it sounded like he was getting his story out early, just in case they found evidence. But his coworkers confirmed he had been at work all day and hadn’t left. He also agreed to take a polygraph test and showed no signs of deception.
So, Charlie was cleared. Not long after, police received a tip that seemed promising. A mail carrier came forward and said she had arrived at Linda’s house around 11:30 on the day of the murder. As she put letters in the mailbox, she saw a pickup truck pulling away from the house.
The man behind the wheel was in his thirties or forties, with messy hair and a light-colored beard. She noticed red marks on his hands that looked like scratches. Police created a composite sketch and released it to the media, but no one could identify the man. No other witnesses came forward.
Linda’s house was set far back from the street, so none of the neighbors had seen or heard anything. Then detectives started looking at Robert, the father of Linda’s youngest son. After their breakup years earlier, Robert had shown little interest in the boy. But a few weeks before the murder, he had suddenly contacted Linda and said he wanted to rebuild a relationship with his son.
Linda hadn’t taken it well. Robert had problems with alcohol and drugs, and she didn’t want her son exposed to that. They had several tense arguments over the phone. Detectives brought Robert in for questioning.
Almost right away, his behavior made him look suspicious. He claimed he hadn’t spoken to Linda in several years, even though Charlie had told detectives they had argued just weeks before her death. Robert also had no alibi. He said he had been home, but no one could confirm it.
Before long, he stopped answering questions and hired a lawyer. But police had no actual evidence linking him to the murder. Without evidence, there wasn’t much they could do. Next, they looked into John, the man Linda had moved to California with.
People close to Linda described him as aggressive and quick-tempered. He had once hit her, and it was after that incident that she filed for divorce and moved back to Minnesota. But at the time of the murder, John was in California teaching classes at the school where he worked. He had no physical opportunity to commit the crime.
Investigators couldn’t rule out the possibility that he had hired someone, but they found no evidence to support it. Over the next several months, police looked into nearly a hundred different men. Each time, the trail went cold. Eventually, the case went quiet.
Linda’s family kept calling detectives several times a month, always getting the same answer: no progress. Her older sister, Sandy, fought hardest of all. She talked to journalists, gave interviews, and did everything she could to keep the case alive. Then, in 1999, a new sheriff took over the local department.
He decided to take a fresh look at old unsolved cases, and Linda’s murder was among them. By then, seven years had passed, and DNA testing had become widely available. Detectives sent the killer’s semen sample to a lab, where experts extracted a DNA profile. They compared it first to the DNA of Charlie, Robert, and John.
Charlie and John both had solid alibis, but Robert was still under suspicion after lying about his contact with Linda. His DNA didn’t match. Investigators then requested samples from more than eighty other suspects. All of them agreed voluntarily.
None of them matched either. The killer’s profile was entered into the FBI database, but that produced no hits either. The department even offered a $5,000 reward for information, but it brought nothing useful. The case stalled for another year until it took a completely unexpected turn.
Police received a call from a woman named Angela. She said she had an idea of who might have killed Linda. Angela hadn’t known the victim personally, but back in 1992, she had been dating a man named Kent Jones. And soon after the murder, she had started wondering whether he could have been responsible.
Detectives recognized the name immediately. Jones had been in the case files from the very first days of the investigation, just not as a suspect. He was Linda’s neighbor, living a little over half a mile from her house. Police had asked him a few routine questions back then, and he had said he hadn’t seen anything and hadn’t known the victim.
Jones lived with his wife and four children. He was a Boy Scout leader, regularly attended church with his family, and was regarded as a respected member of the community. But according to Angela, in 1992, he had been secretly involved with her. And that was only the beginning.
A few weeks after the murder, Angela brought it up with Jones, since she knew he lived near the victim. He told her he didn’t know Linda and had never seen her. But Angela noticed that his behavior changed suddenly. He became angry for no reason she could understand.
A few months later, the murder came up again. This time, Jones said something different. He admitted he had actually spoken to Linda shortly before her death and that he had seen her jogging past his house in the mornings from time to time. Angela found the changing story extremely suspicious.
From that point on, she couldn’t shake the feeling that he might have had something to do with it. They broke up soon after, but it took her eight years to summon the courage to call the police. Detectives were interested. They began looking at Jones much more closely.
They found that he had a conviction for insurance fraud, but that was only the tip of the iceberg. There were multiple records of accusations of domestic violence. He regularly hit his wife and had even been arrested for it, but each time she refused to press charges. At one point, his wife was hospitalized with a stab wound and told police she had accidentally fallen onto a kitchen knife that was sticking out of the dishwasher.
Given the history, police suspected her husband, but without her testimony, there was nothing they could do. If Angela’s story was true, then Jones had lied to police when he said he had never seen the victim. That was enough to put him on the suspect list. Back in 1992, he had told police he was home at the time of the murder, and his wife had confirmed it.
But detectives doubted they could trust her word, given how many times she had covered for her husband. Eight years later, investigators went back to Jones’s house. They began the conversation carefully, saying they were simply reviewing an old case and hoping to find some new information. Jones told them the same thing he had said in 1992: he had never spoken to Linda and didn’t know her personally.
Then his wife corrected him. “Don’t you remember? Shortly before it happened, she came over to ask how she could sign her son up for the Boy Scouts. ”
Police saw Jones’s face twist with anger.
Still, he admitted he had simply forgotten about that moment. He also confirmed that he had seen the victim jogging along the road in front of his house a few times. Then officers asked the most important question of all. Had he ever been intimate with Linda?
The strongest piece of evidence was the semen recovered from her body. If Jones denied any physical relationship and his DNA later matched that sample, it would tie him directly to the crime with almost no explanation left. Jones said no. Then they asked whether he would be willing to provide a DNA sample voluntarily.
Out of nearly a hundred people, he became the first to refuse. Detectives went to a judge for a warrant. Once the papers were signed, they returned to Jones, and this time he had no choice. His sample was sent to the lab, and experts confirmed that his DNA matched the semen found on Linda’s body.
On July 25, 2000, Jones was arrested. He insisted he was innocent. But when the case went to trial, he changed his story. He claimed that he and Linda had actually been having a secret affair and that they had been intimate the day before she died.
The prosecution responded with one of the state’s leading experts. He examined the semen sample and testified that, based on the test results, it had to have been left no more than a few hours before Linda’s death, not a full day earlier. To the jury, it looked like Jones was trying to reshape his story around the evidence. The prosecution argued that Jones had become interested in Linda after she came over to ask about her son joining the Boy Scouts.
That morning, he had gone to her house with some excuse and pressured her for sex. When she refused, he attacked her, sexually assaulted her, and strangled her. Then he took a kitchen knife and stabbed her repeatedly, making absolutely sure she was dead. The jury reached a unanimous verdict.
Jones was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for at least thirty years, meaning not before 2030. But Jones’s attorneys filed an appeal. They argued that the judge had unfairly prevented them from pointing to other possible suspects, like Robert or a man from Linda’s gym who had been attracted to her. In 2004, the appeals court sided with Jones.
His conviction was overturned, and he was granted a new trial. It began two years later, and Jones changed his story yet again. Before, he had claimed he and Linda had been intimate the day before the murder. Now, he insisted it had actually happened on the morning she died.
That way, his new version lined up with the expert’s conclusion that the semen could not have been more than twenty-four hours old. The prosecution argued that there was no evidence Linda had been cheating on her husband. Everyone close to her insisted she never would have done such a thing. Jones responded with a straight face that he was a skilled lover and that women simply couldn’t resist him.
His attorneys even called his wife as a witness to confirm that claim. She said that in reality, Jones was not that good in bed at all. In the end, he was found guilty again. This time, the court rejected his appeal.
But in 2015, something unexpected happened. The expert who had determined that the semen could not have been a full day old was named Michael McGee. He ran a private practice out of his own lab, had thirty years of experience, and was considered one of the most talented medical examiners in the state. Over time, his work started raising questions, and an independent investigation reached some troubling conclusions.
McGee was accused of using methods that didn’t have a strong scientific foundation. In Linda’s case, he had used a test meant to detect a specific enzyme in semen to establish her time of death. But the test had very little proven reliability in that context, and the same enzyme is also found in the human body, which could easily produce false results. It wasn’t outright fraud, but his questionable methods led to a review of every case he had worked on.
There were more than two hundred of them, and in some cases, convictions were overturned. Jones’s attorneys seized the opportunity and demanded that his conviction be thrown out. But in this case, it didn’t lead anywhere. The DNA analysis still showed that the semen matched Jones’s biological sample, and there was no doubt about the accuracy of that test.
As of now, Jones is still serving his sentence. In just a few years, he will be eligible to request parole, but the chances of it being approved are fairly low. And if Angela had never shared her suspicions with detectives, Jones could have continued avoiding punishment. His name had been in the case file since 1992, but all that time, no one had seriously considered him as a suspect until that tip came in.
One phone call, eight years later, was all it took to finally bring him to justice.
