Hunted
A family dispute escalated into a four-year poaching prosecution that ended in three deaths and no resolution
By Stephen Dark @stephenpdarkPage 2 of 2
In February, investigators also interviewed Robert Jensen. "A firestorm's coming," they told him. But Robert was adamant: "I guarantee you will never have a witness take the stand who's ever seen me poach deer. You don't have it. There's not one piece of DNA evidence on one of my racks. It's not there. There's no gun ballistics. There's no illegal pictures. If they can prosecute on that, I don't know how."
One of the investigators said that "your average hunter ... might have one or two good trophy bucks in their whole life." When the jury saw the number of heads Robert and his brother had, it would depict them in a bad light, the investigator said.
"It can paint a picture all it wants," Robert replied. "It's a hearsay baloney case. I ain't flipping on anybody; there's nothing to flip on."
In March, Robert says, Meister called him at his shop, urging him to make a deal. When he declined, Meister told him his brother's house was "like a wildlife museum."
Robert responded that their father had given them two-thirds of the heads. Meister said that if Gerald Sr. had "the guts to take the stand," he'd prosecute him, too.
Meister denies ever speaking to Robert. "I have never talked to Robert L. Jensen in court or otherwise."
A few weeks later, on April 15, 2010, Watrous and a DWR investigator went to see Jackie. They urged her to cooperate, to "come clean" about the two animals she said she killed, to "save yourself some grief before we file charges." One accused her of lying.
"It feels to me like you guys want me to lie and that's what you're here for," she told them. "It bothers me. I'm not going to lie. I'm not going to change my story."
Regardless, the investigators told her, they were going to charge her with obstruction of justice.
ALONE IN THE WORLD
On April 27, 2010, Robert Jensen and his brother, Jerry, along with Jerry's wife, Angella, and their sons Jerry Jr. and Robert Tyler Jensen, were charged with 19 felonies and one misdemeanor, ranging from wanton destruction of a protected species to racketeering.
Two days later, all five were in jail, Robert on bail of $150,007 and Jerry on bail of $225,000—amounts typically associated with homicides or defendants with high-flight risk.
At their arraignment, the five co-defendants shuffled into court in orange jumpsuits, shackled wrist and ankle. "Meister acted like I was the boss of a crime family," Jerry says.
It was only when Jerry saw the probable-cause statement that he learned his wife had been DWR's informant. He says Angella told him, "I don't know why I did this. It's ruined our lives."
Angella and Jerry lost their home shortly after they went to jail.
View Angella's charges and probable-cause statementMeister convinced several judges hearing different cases involving the family to agree to no-contact orders. Robert and Jerry could no longer talk to each other, or to their sister, mother or father. Jerry could not talk to Angella, or to his sons, who were also barred from communicating with family members.
A DEATH IN THE FAMILY
Jackie found the isolation imposed by the no-contact orders brutal. "Her brothers have always lived close and been her moral support and all the sudden she didn't have them, so meanwhile you kept the pressure on her regardless of her state of health and mind," her father, Gerald Jensen Sr., wrote to Meister.
Neighbors and friends wrote 10 affidavits attesting to Meister's harassment of Jackie. Brenda Dais, Jackie's neighbor since 1992, wrote that twice she witnessed Jackie's stress and panic after being threatened by Meister. "One time it was to the point that I could hear him screaming at her [on the phone] that he was going to put her ass in jail, take away her son if she did not tell the truth about her brothers," the affidavit states.
In the early hours of June 24, 2010, Jackie climbed into the branches of a tree overlooking the back of her mother's home and hanged herself.
Jackie's death scarred the family, Jerry says. Their mother "went downhill very fast after Jackie died," Jerry says. "Her mind was completely gone after six months. I don't think she could bear losing Jackie."
Their father could not contain his rage against Meister and Schlappi. In his notarized letter, Gerald Jensen Sr. wrote, "Tomorrow I'm going to bury my daughter who never hurt a soul in her life. I guess that would be a win for you. 1 down, 5 to go."
KICKING AGAINST THE PRICKS
On July 20, 2010, DWR investigator Schlappi and the DA's Watrous interviewed John Peterson, Jackie's widower. They'd been married just six months.
Peterson told them that Jackie's brothers had removed him from his mother-in-law's home, and that Jackie had committed suicide "due to the pressure and intimidation place[d] on her by her brothers [...] to lie to law enforcement regarding her involvement in hunting activities," an investigator wrote in his report. He told the investigators that Jackie had told him "she had gone with her brothers on a couple of hunts and they tried to get her to shoot a deer, but she wouldn't, so they shot it and used her tag."
The day after the interview, a DWR lieutenant served a search warrant at Jackie's home, looking for antlers and a tape of one of the hunts Jackie took part in that Peterson said he had buried in the backyard. Officers found only "holes that looked fairly recent."
On July 22, 2010, Meister called Robert's attorney, Michael Cooper, and in a recorded conversation included in Robert's discovery, complained about the "monstrous and unfair" claims in the affidavits of him bullying Jackie. Meister said he had "co-defendants in murder cases who are not as big as pricks as these guys are." He added that "these people clearly believe we are Satan. It's a burden I'm willing to carry."
He hadn't even started with them, he advised Cooper. "They haven't even seen me be zealous yet."
After Cooper—since deceased—urged his client to take a plea deal of two third-degree felonies, 90 days in jail, and $8,000 in restitution, Robert hired former prosecutor and veteran child-welfare defense attorney Colleen Coebergh. She reviewed his discovery and told him, "Don't take a misdemeanor [plea deal], don't take anything. I can't believe the prosecutor took this."
In late October 2010, Watrous filed charges alleging witness tampering against the brothers over six-month-old jail calls the state had recorded, and had Robert and Jerry arrested and jailed with bail set at $150,007.
Coebergh says the bail was set so high "in direct response to Robert Jensen's refusal to take a deal."
Robert used insurance money from Jackie's death to bail out within hours of being arrested. Without that money, he says, he would have been forced to take a plea deal or lose the family business, American Saw & Hammer, which Robert has worked at since age 16 and later bought and staffed with his brother, nephews, wife, daughter and son-in-law.
THE WAITING GAME
Before the state prosecuted the Jensens, they first had to put Angella on trial in order to, through acquittal or conviction, remove her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, "so that she would be available to be called at Mr. Jensen's trial," wrote Coebergh in a 2014 motion.
The others had to wait to have their preliminary hearings until Angella's case was over.
Her case became bogged down in continuances, sought by both the state and the defense. While Meister says the state asked for only one continuance, at one hearing no one from the DA's Office even showed up, resulting in a judge awarding attorney's fees to the defense, only for that order to be subsequently vacated.
The wait dragged on and on, grinding at the defendants' nerves.
"I wanted a prelim," Jerry Jr. says, but Meister kept putting it off. The prosecutor had surgery, he was out of town, "and the judges kept on letting him do it," he says. "I wanted to move on with my life ... if you're going to convict me, frigging convict me, just be done with it."
In July 2011, Gerald Jensen Sr. died at the age of 67. He'd gone to the hospital for minor surgery, Robert says, then died within the week from a heart attack.
His children believe he never got over Jackie's death. "He told me Jackie's up there by herself," Robert's wife, Wendy, says. "If something was going to happen to him, he wouldn't mind being with Jackie again."
In February 2013, after Angella's trial was postponed for a fourth time, Judge Ann Boyden dropped the no-contact order, which had been in place for three years.
"It had just been going on for so long," says Angella and Jerry's son Robert Tyler. "It was terrible, it was unreal. The worst thing ever not being able to talk to your own family, not being able to see them for birthdays."
FORFEITED HEADS
By November 2013, with her fifth jury trial setting pending, the stress from the legal proceedings was aggravating Angella's chronic ulcers. Jerry Jr. brought her food on the night of Nov. 15, 2013, and told her she should go to hospital, but she refused.
Early on the morning of Nov. 16, Robert Tyler checked on his mother to find she had died. She was 47.
The family says that in court, the state referred to her death as a suicide, but the medical examiner later ruled it an accidental overdose of doctor-prescribed drugs.
Jerry says he lost 60 pounds in the ensuing months and attempted suicide several times. Despite their often tumultuous relationship, he says, he thought, "We'd always stay together. I can't even express it."
With Angella dead, the prosecutions on the 2010 poaching charges could move forward. Robert's preliminary hearing was set for April 15, 2014.
Ten days before the hearing, Meister and co-prosecutor Stephen Nelson wrote to Coebergh that "the death of Angella has negatively impacted the prosecution of the wildlife case." They continued, "While we feel the family has lost enough, we are not willing to walk away completely from these cases."
If Robert Jensen pleaded to two class A misdemeanors on aiding or abetting the wanton destruction of protected wildlife, then all other charges against him would be dismissed, including a Dec. 2010 case filed against his wife for obstruction of justice relating to a May 2010 jail phone call. Robert said no deal.
In a letter to Meister, Coebergh wrote, "I really have no idea what interest the state has in more delay in this case, but it is clear that that is the tactic."
On May 14, 2014, Meister dismissed the wildlife charges against Robert and Jerry Jensen, and Jerry's sons Jerry Jr. and Robert Tyler, and agreed to diversions on Jerry's charges of obstructing justice and witness tampering. That still left Robert Jensen's witness-tampering charges, set for an August hearing.
Jerry Jr. received a call from his legal defender attorney Patrick Coram. "You're done. Case dismissed." His face lights up as he remembers. "Oh boy, I was freaking excited." He went to Robert Tyler's work, the two of them jumping up and down, hugging each other. "It was like Christmas day," Jerry Jr. says. "It's better; it's hunting."
That, however, was not the end of it for the brothers. In September 2014, four months after the cases against them were dismissed, Meister filed motions that they would forfeit their deer heads as part of a plea deal relating to the dismissals. Two days later, Judge Boyden signed off on it.
While Meister finds "a measure of justice" in Jerry Jr. and Robert Tyler's forfeited heads, this agreement was news to the brothers and also to Coram, who says he cannot recall any such deal.
LESSONS LEARNED
Hunting, Jerry Jr. says, standing on Black Mountain one bright early September morning, bow in hand, the distinct scent of deer in air, is about trying to best your opponent. "A great big buck is as smart as any human," he says. "They know their way around the country, they know every nook and cranny to go to get away from a predator. So you have to try and figure out how to outsmart a deer who lives here all year round."
Though Robert's wildlife charges had been dismissed, it took attorney Coebergh sending certified letters to Salt Lake District Attorney Sim Gill and the DWR threatening a federal lawsuit before the state returned Jensen's 29 heads and antlers. Bare for nearly five years, his walls now echo once more with hunting memories.
A hearing is set for Dec. 8 to determine the fate of Jerry's heads.
Next year's hunting season will be the first Robert will have been able to participate in since 2009.
"This business took five years of my prime hunting life, that I could have killed one or two more big deer," he says.
But the prosecution cost him far more.
"Mom's gone, Dad's gone, my sister's gone, Jerry's wife's gone," he says, looking out the window into the night. "It's just sad."
Meister also views the end of the case as unrewarding for either prosecutor or defendants. "I'd like to present this evidence in court. Really they haven't had their day in court, and neither have we."
On Aug. 4, 2014, Meister agreed to a diversion—if Robert Jensen stayed out of trouble for six months, his witness-tampering charges would be dismissed.
"I think people have maybe learned their lesson in this case and that's why we're doing a diversion your honor," Meister said.
Meister told the court that the victim in the case—DWR—was unhappy, but, given the losses the family had endured, "we think in light of everything there has been a fair resolution."
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