Bio

Richard Allen Jensen Jr. was born on December 12, 1946. Before his conviction, he lived in Michigan and worked as a teacher and hockey coach at Ottawa Hills High School in Grand Rapids. Public reports described him as a man who had lived an outwardly ordinary life before the killing that led to his imprisonment.

At the time of the murder, Jensen was 44 years old. He had no widely reported public criminal record before the case. The crime shocked people who knew him because of his position in the local school community and because of the extreme violence involved.

Some crime references have linked Jensen to three killings of women involved in prostitution in Kent County, Michigan, between 1990 and 1991. However, available verified records show that he was convicted of only one murder: the 1991 killing of Kerry Mansfield.

Murder Story

On March 17, 1991, Richard Jensen met 23-year-old Kerry Mansfield in an area of Grand Rapids known for prostitution. According to later reporting, Jensen agreed to pay Mansfield for sex. The two went to a church parking lot near Lake Drive SE in Grand Rapids. At some point, Jensen later claimed he could not go through with the encounter. A confrontation followed, and Mansfield was stabbed repeatedly.

Mansfield was stabbed 55 times. Prosecutors later described the killing as a violent attack and opposed Jensen’s release when he became eligible for parole decades later. Jensen was arrested and prosecuted in Kent County, Michigan. He was convicted of Second-Degree Murder and sentenced on November 12, 1991, to life imprisonment.

The case later became associated with broader suspicion that Jensen may have been connected to other killings of women involved in prostitution in the Grand Rapids area. These suspicions appear in crime reference material, but public records do not show that he was convicted of those additional deaths.

In 2019, the Michigan Parole Board scheduled a public hearing to consider Jensen’s parole. At that time, the Michigan Department of Corrections confirmed that he was serving a life sentence for Second-Degree Murder out of Kent County. Local reporting stated that Jensen, then 72 and reportedly suffering from dementia, was later granted parole.