Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, July 14, 1995 TAG: 9507140114
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: BOUNTIFUL, UTAH LENGTH: Medium
A missing-person report filed by a husband anxious about his wife uncovered the shocking truth: The wife was actually a man who is accused of taking the husband for up to $40,000 during their 3 1/2-year marriage.
Felix Urioste is in jail on $20,000 bail on fraud charges, and Bruce Jensen is confused, embarrassed and broke. Jensen told police he didn't know his wife was a man until officers convinced him.
``I feel pretty stupid,'' Jensen, 39, told the Standard-Examiner of Ogden.
The deception - reminiscent of the Broadway drama ``M. Butterfly'' - unraveled when Urioste, 34, was arrested in Las Vegas for using 33 credit cards that were fraudulently obtained in the names of Bruce and Leasa Jensen and others. At the time, Urioste was traveling as a bearded man.
Prosecutor Bill McGuire said Jensen was ``just incredibly naive.''
``You've got a situation where a guy didn't have a normal marriage,'' he said. ``The victim is just a really nice guy.''
Authorities said Urioste was able to pull off the deception because he looked like a woman and because Jensen never saw him naked.
Urioste's sister, Jeannie, said her brother fled the marriage in April after he started questioning his longstanding intention to complete sex-change surgery.
Urioste had had his testicles but not his penis removed and was taking female hormones that gave him slight breasts, she said. He apparently stopped taking the hormones this spring; in his mug shot, he has a thick mustache.
``He was confused about his being, about his wanting to be a woman. He had found out that it was OK to be a man and to be gay,'' the sister said in a telephone interview from Las Vegas, N.M.
The couple got married when Urioste told Jensen he was pregnant with twins after a single sexual encounter in 1991, McGuire said. The prosecutor said Jensen married Urioste out of a sense of responsibility, and the marriage was basically celibate.
Several months after the marriage, Urioste told him the twins were stillborn and also falsely claimed he had cancer.
The couple were married in the Mormon Church, and members of the congregation said Jensen was widely respected for caring for his supposedly cancer-stricken wife while working two jobs.
Jensen's Mormon bishop, Dick L. Smith, said the few members of the congregation who know about the case are heartsick for Jensen. ``He's just a little country bumpkin from Wyoming that wouldn't hurt a flea,'' he said.
Jensen is seeking an annulment, citing irreconcilable differences.
``It ripped me up pretty good,'' he said. ``It trashes you out to believe everything a person says and find out they lied to you on basically 100 percent of it.''
In April, Jensen filed a missing-person report with Bountiful police when he couldn't locate Urioste, who had said he was going to New York for experimental cancer treatments. Bountiful police investigated and discovered that Urioste already had been arrested in Las Vegas on credit card fraud.
Prosecutors said Urioste ran up at least $40,000 in credit card bills.
Jensen told police the couple met at a Coke machine at the University of Utah Health Sciences Center while Urioste was masquerading as a female doctor.
Jeannie Urioste said her brother ran away from home at 13, lived on the streets, attended college and planned to go to medical school.
``Felix has always been a woman to me,'' she said. ``He's very educated, very intelligent. He would never hurt anyone intentionally.''
Jensen couldn't immediately be reached for comment Thursday because he has moved out of Bountiful and is staying with relatives.
He told the newspaper that as soon as the case is over, he'll return to his native Wyoming and ``crawl in a hole for a few years and not let anyone within rifle range.''
by CNB