Man acquitted of murder
Donna Mae Jokumsen, a 22-year-old mother of two sons, vanished from her Chandler home in 1987 never to be seen again. Thursday, a judge acquitted her now 56-year-old husband of her murder.
Donna Mae Jokumsen, a mother of two sons, disappeared from her Chandler home on July 5, 1987. She was 22. Her sons were age 3 and 1.
No one ever saw her again. Friends, family and Chandler police believe she was killed. A grand jury indicted her husband, Kevin Jokumsen, on second-degree murder charges. He was arrested and extradited from Washington to Arizona in September 2017.
But Thursday, a judge acquitted the 56-year-old Jokumsen in his wife’s murder.
Reopening the cold case
The case had been cold for decades when Chandler police reopened it in 2013 and re-interviewed witnesses. No new evidence was found, but the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office presented the case to a grand jury.
The grand jury determined there was enough probable cause to charge Jokomsen with murder.
The trial started Sept. 30 and was expected to last until Wednesday.
But Jokumsen’s lawyers filed a motion asking Judge Ronda Fisk for a direct verdict. Fisk entered a verdict of acquittal, according to a court document filed on Thursday.
This motion, which is often requested but rarely granted, can be sought by either the prosecution or a defense at
torney. It essentially asks the judge to decide on a verdict rather than let the jury decided.
It typically means a judge has determined that there is not enough evidence to determine beyond a reasonable doubt that the person accused committed the crime and there is no need to continue the trial.
No body was ever found
In the 1990s, Deputy County Attorney Robert Shutts declined to present the case to a jury because there was no body.
During opening arguments, Shutts, who prosecuted the case this time, laid out a timeline that dated from the couple’s high school years to 1987 to when Chandler police detectives interviewed Jokumsen after his wife’s disappearance.
Shutts pointed out the inconsistencies in Jokumsen’s story about how his wife went missing.
He told the jurors that Kevin Jokumsen portrayed his marriage to police as a healthy one, even though family members on both sides described it as a toxic relationship.
Kaitlin Perkins, one of Jokumsen’s public defenders, was blunt in her opening statement, saying Chandler police have been investigating an innocent man.
“Chandler police had never considered anything or anyone else for the cause of Donna’s disappearance,” she told the jurors.
Perkins theorized on other possibilities of what may have happened to Donna.
“Is Donna dead? They don’t know. Did she run away from her life to start a new one? We don’t know,” Perkins said. “Did she go somewhere with the wrong people who killed her? They don’t know; we don’t know; no one knows.”
To Arizona from Washington
A 200-page Chandler police report includes statements from friends and family, tips received by the department and newspaper clippings. It paints a picture of a young couple that had physically fought since their high-school years.
Kevin’s older sister told police that Donna being with her brother was like “gas on a fire.” Fights between the two would sometimes escalate into physical violence, she told investigators.
“That relationship was not healthy. If I could have hog-tied him and got him away from her, I would have done it,” Kevin’s mother, Jeanne Jokumsen, told The Arizona Republic in 2018. “But this is the end result, and we’ve all paid a price.”
The couple had moved to Chandler from Enumclaw, Washington, in part to start a new life with their two sons. The two settled into a house on Gary Drive, near Alma School and Ray roads, in 1987. In July 1987, Donna called her father in Washington state to ask if she and her sons could seek refuge at his house. She told him she was tired of the violent fights with her husband, according to the police report.
He said yes. But her family didn’t hear from her again. A little more than a week after she called her father, they reported her missing to police on July 11, 1987.
Among the last people to see Donna alive were sisters Jackie Oxford and Myra Sandoval. Donna attended a bank teller school with Oxford, who then introduced Donna to her sister.
During a 2016 interview with police, Sandoval told detectives Donna spent part of the Fourth of July weekend with Sandoval’s family, and they had gone to a river in Donna’s blue Chevrolet Chevelle.
By the time they returned to Sandoval’s home, the car was dirty, she said.
Soon after her disappearance, police in 1987 asked Kevin why, if Donna had left it behind, the Chevelle was cleaned out and washed. Kevin told them he didn’t know.
Kevin Jokumsen’s side of the story
Kevin told police that his wife had abandoned him and their children.
In a written statement at the time, he said that Donna asked him for money because she wanted to take a summer vacation with the boys in Washington. Kevin gave her $500 so she could rent a U-Haul van to take some of the boys’ stuff, he wrote.
According to him, Donna said she was going to say goodbye to her friends and return later that night to talk about when she would leave. But when he woke up the next morning, her car was washed and parked in front of the house and he never saw or heard from her again, he wrote.
Then, during an interview with detectives at a Chandler police station, Kevin wept when they told him they suspected Donna was murdered.
“He began sobbing and said that nothing has happened to her because she is too strong for anything to have happened to her,” according to a police report dated July 24, 1987. “He kept crying and uttering statements like, ‘Please God, don’t let anything happen to her,’ and ‘She’ll let someone know where she is.’”