A Gun to His Own Brother's Head: Adelle Katherine Jensen

Author

Benjamin Hayes

Publication Date

April 25, 2024

Adelle Katherine Jensen, known to friends and family as Addie, was twenty five years old in the fall of 2015, a recent graduate of Dunwoody College of Technology working as a radiology technician, described by those who knew her as someone who loved animals and spending time outdoors. She had a two year old daughter with her boyfriend, Joshua Lewis Duane Dow, and the two of them had been living together in north Minneapolis. A few weeks before her disappearance, Adelle made a decision that, in hindsight, reads as an attempt to protect both herself and her daughter, taking the toddler and moving out to live with her own parents in Carver County rather than continuing to share a home with Dow.

A Refusal Outside a Bar

On the night of November 17 into the early morning hours of November 18, 2015, Adelle was out with Dow at the Downtown Cabaret in Minneapolis. Sometime around 2:30 a.m., as the venue was closing for the night, Dow and his brother approached Adelle and asked her to get into their car. She refused, choosing instead to walk away down the street on her own, a small act of independence from a woman who had already taken the more significant step of moving out and taking their child with her weeks earlier. That refusal outside the Downtown Cabaret marks the last confirmed sighting of Adelle Jensen alive by anyone outside her own killer's family.

A Gunshot at Five in the Morning

Sometime around 5 a.m. that same morning, inside Dow's home in north Minneapolis, he shot Adelle to death. Exactly how she came to be back at his home after refusing to get in his car just a couple hours earlier has never been fully detailed in public reporting, but what followed afterward was methodical in a way that suggested Dow moved quickly to manage the consequences of what he had done. He transported her body to a warehouse where he had previously worked and stuffed it into a locker there, buying himself time before beginning the far more grim task of actually disposing of her remains permanently.

Forcing His Own Brother to Help

What makes this case particularly disturbing, beyond the killing itself, is exactly how Dow secured help in covering it up. According to his brother's later statement to police, Dow forced him to participate at gunpoint, pointing the weapon directly at his brother's head and threatening to shoot both him and their own mother if he refused to cooperate. Under that threat, Dow's brother helped him transport Adelle's body to the warehouse locker. In the days that followed, investigators say Dow dismembered her body and scattered the remains across multiple sites throughout the city. He also forced his brother to help him cut apart a couch stained with Adelle's blood, breaking it down into disposable pieces that were then discarded separately from her remains, an effort to eliminate the one piece of furniture evidence that could have directly tied the crime back to his own home. Adelle's body has never been recovered, despite investigators later sifting through an estimated sixty to one hundred tons of garbage in an effort to locate any trace of her remains.

A Story That Held for Years

In the immediate aftermath, Dow told both police and Adelle's own parents that he had seen her alive after the night she disappeared, a direct lie intended to buy himself distance from the timeline of her actual death. He later shifted his story, falsely claiming that Adelle had committed suicide, an account that, however unconvincing on its own merits, managed to hold up long enough to avoid an immediate murder charge. In 2016, Dow pleaded guilty to a gross misdemeanor charge of interfering with a dead body, along with a separate first degree drug sales charge, convictions that acknowledged his role in concealing what had happened to Adelle without yet formally charging him with causing her death in the first place. For years, that lesser conviction stood as the only formal accounting for what Dow had actually done.

Four Years to Build a Case

It took investigators a full four years beyond Adelle's disappearance to develop the additional evidence needed to finally charge Dow with her murder directly. During that extended investigative period, detectives continued gathering evidence, including his brother's account of being forced to help at gunpoint, cell phone records placing Dow at the warehouse in the early morning hours after the shooting, and a recovered .38 caliber revolver connected to the killing. Text messages between Dow and Adelle recovered during the investigation revealed a relationship marked by escalating conflict in its final weeks, including messages in which Dow explicitly threatened to fight Adelle for custody of their daughter if she left him, a threat that took on considerably darker weight once investigators understood what he had actually done to her instead.

A Guilty Plea Four Years Later

In November 2019, Joshua Dow pleaded guilty to second degree unintentional murder in connection with Adelle's death, finally providing a formal legal accounting for what had happened to her more than four years after she vanished from outside the Downtown Cabaret. He was sentenced in December 2019 to twenty years in prison as part of the plea agreement. During his sentencing hearing, six of Adelle's family members delivered victim impact statements, describing the toll her loss had taken across the years spent waiting for any kind of resolution. Adelle's own father spoke directly to the extended effort investigators had put into the case, expressing gratitude that the homicide department, in his words, kept up with the effort and gathered enough evidence to actually make the eventual conviction happen, an acknowledgment of just how long and effortful the path to that guilty plea had actually been.

A Relationship That Had Already Turned Dangerous

The decision Adelle made in the weeks before her death, packing up her toddler and moving back in with her own parents rather than continuing to share a home with Dow, takes on considerable weight in hindsight, suggesting she had already recognized something dangerous enough in the relationship to warrant that kind of disruption to her own life. The custody threats recovered in their text messages afterward only reinforce that reading, showing a man who understood that losing Adelle also meant losing the kind of control a shared household and a shared child had given him over her daily life. Her refusal to get into his car outside the Downtown Cabaret that final night, choosing instead to walk away on her own, reads in that same light as a small, ordinary act of self protection from a woman who had every reason to want distance from him, one that tragically did not end up being enough to keep her safe for the rest of that same night.

A Case Resolved on Paper, Unfinished in Practice

Even with Dow's conviction and twenty year sentence now in place, Adelle Jensen's own remains have never been located, leaving her family, including the daughter she was actively trying to protect in the weeks before her death, without any physical place to grieve her. What the case leaves behind instead is a specific, disturbing portrait of exactly how far Dow was willing to go to protect himself after the fact, coercing his own brother into helping dispose of evidence under direct threat to that brother's life and their shared mother's life, methodically dismantling a bloodstained couch, and scattering a young mother's remains widely enough across a major city that even a search through a hundred tons of garbage could never recover her.

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