Kriti Mehrotra
If there’s one thing ABC’s ’20/20: Death Foretold’ and NBC’s ‘Dateline: Secrets in Pleasant Prairie’ make perfectly evident, it’s that the tragic demise of Julie Griffin Jensen on December 9, 1998, turned several lives completely upside down. That’s because the father of her two sons Mark Jensen was the one to kill her with the help of poisons, syringes, as well as a pillow, and then there’s the woman he was having an affair with. Yet for now, if you simply wish to learn more about the latter, Kelly Renee LaBonte — with a particular focus on her romance with the convict and her current standing — we’ve got you covered.
Who is Kelly LaBonte?
It was around the late summer-early fall of 1998 when Kelly first came in close contact with Mark despite the fact he’d been married for nearly 14 years, and she was engaged to someone else. The truth is they were not only co-workers at the Racine, Wisconsin, arm of the financial firm Stifel Nicolaus, but the latter was also her superior as he held the position of Branch Manager. However, she has since made it clear it was a mutual affair, in the duration of which she actually married her fiancé Mark Rhyner Grieman following years of on-again-off-again to maintain her secret.
According to Kelly’s own accounts, her primary means of communication with her lover was e-mails, where neither ever hesitated to express their feelings or their desires to start a new life together. It thus also included flirtatious as well as explicit content, including details of some of their endeavors, their plans for future ones, and the fact Mark referred to his private part as “Boy Scout.” We should even mention that the boyfriend reportedly used his wife’s brief affair years prior as a way to justify his own long-lasting liaison with the woman nearly a decade younger than him.
We say long-lasting because once Julie was out of the picture, Kelly divorced her husband before tying the knot with Mark in 1999 — she ostensibly had no idea he’d actually murdered his wife. The couple subsequently built a good, stable, happy home for themselves, all the while caring for his two sons from the previous marriage and their own baby boy, that is, until his arrest in 2002. In fact, once the entire truth came to light following Mark’s lengthy trial, conviction, and sentencing in 2008, she filed for divorce while keeping primary custody of all three children.
Where is Kelly LaBonte Now?
From what we can tell, Kelly testified against Mark during his 2008 trial and his 2023 retrial on a single count of first-degree intentional homicide, resulting in his conviction both times. Since then, although she prefers to stay well away from the limelight, it appears as if she has moved on with life to the best of her abilities in a personal as well as a professional sense. We’re hence happy to report that the mid-50-year-old is now a remarried woman and goes by Kelly Brooks, all the while happily residing alongside most of her loved ones in either Texas or Georgia as a true family woman.
Read More: Where Are Mark and Julie Jensen’s Sons Now?
