Billy Jensen

Billy Jensen is a true-crime journalist focused squarely on unsolved murders and missing persons. But after seventeen years of writing hundreds of stories with no endings, he was fed up—and decided to try to solve the murders and find the missing himself. It worked. Combining the shoe-leather investigative tenacity and skills he learned reporting crime with radical techniques honed from his day job as a digital executive, Jensen has solved or helped solve ten homicides and helped locate missing persons. Law enforcement agencies now reach out to Jensen to help in cases that have them stumped, using him as a “consulting detective.”

His 2019 book, Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Started Solving Murders (Sourcebooks/Audible) was an instant New York Times Bestseller.

He was friends with Michelle McNamara and, after her sudden passing, helped finish her #1 New York Times bestselling book, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, about the hunt for the Golden State Killer, which will be adapted into an HBO docuseries in 2020. He was a senior producer and investigator on the Warner Bros. show Crime Watch Daily and cohosts The First Degree podcast with Alexis Linkletter and Jac Vanek and Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad podcast with Paul Holes.

In former days, he co-founded the Long Island Press newspaper, earned a master’s degree in religious studies from the University of Kansas and played professional roller hockey (earning the first minor penalty in Major League Roller Hockey history).