Billy Jensen

Author, True Crime Investigative Journalist and Producer

Billy Jensen is an investigative journalist focused 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 work and skills he learned reporting crime with techniques honed from his day job as a digital executive, Jensen has solved or helped solve ten homicides and helped locate missing persons.

He writes about that journey in the New York Times bestseller Chase Darkness with Me: How One True Crime Writer Starting Solving Murders. He has also written crime feature stories for Los Angeles Magazine, Rolling Stone, Boston Magazine, Miami New Times and was a crime stringer for the New York Times. He was a senior producer and investigator on the Warner Bros. show Crime Watch Daily and is currently an executive producer and co-host, along with Alexis Linkletter, of the multi-part series Unraveled on Discovery+, and cohosts The First Degree podcast with Linkletter and Jac Vanek. He is the co-creator of Jensen & Holes: The Murder Squad podcast. He was friends with writer Michelle McNamara, and after her sudden passing helped finish her book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. His new book, Killers Amidst Killers: Hunting Serial Killers Operating Under the Cloak of the Opioid Epidemic, comes out July 19th, 2022.

In former days, he co-founded the Long Island Press newspaper, where he wrote a crime column and numerous crime features, 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).