Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder Read Free

assassinated on November 22, 1963, and America changed forever.
    Hermann Harris had clipped articles on bomb shelters, but his daughters weren’t aware of that until after he died—much too young, at fifty-two—of a sudden heart attack. Their mother, Lorraine, was only forty-two when she was left to raise her two daughters: Sue was ten and Carol was eighteen. Fortunately, Hermann Harris had been wise in his investments and he left his family well provided for, and there were veteran’s benefits from his service in World War II that would pay for his two girls to go to college.
    Sue and Carol had seen a happy marriage, and although they missed their father a lot, their mother stepped up to take the reins of responsibility. She was a loving and brave woman and her girls adored her.
    When Sue was in the third grade, her parents had bought a house in Newport Hills, a new community where houses and streets blossomed up the hill above the 405 Freeway. It was more expensive than Lake Hills and there was more chance there for individuality and architect-designed homes. Home values in Newport Hills grew exponentially over the decades ahead. They shot up even faster than the giant sequoia sapling that Hermann had planted in the Harrises’ front yard when they first moved in.
    Just below Newport Hills, adventurous contractors came up with a plan to build another, even more posh community by filling in the shoreline on the eastern edge of Lake Washington. It was called Newport Shores, and Sue’s dad had scoffed at the idea, saying, “Who would ever want to live down in that swamp?” For once, he’d been wrong. Although the houses on the hills grew steadily in value, those on the shore tripled and retripled continually in listing prices over the next four decades.
    Sue watched her mother evolve from a stay-at-home housewife to a competent head of her household, and Sue admired her more all the time. Lorraine Harris vowed that her daughters would go to college. Carol chose the University of Washington in Seattle, but Sue picked Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, on the eastern side of the state. There, more than three hundred miles away from the Seattle area, the hills of the Palouse roll on endlessly, the soil and weather perfect for fields of golden, undulating wheat. The summers were blazing hot, while the winters brought frigid temperatures and deep snowdrifts. It was another world, and Sue Harris loved it.
    Sue was a smart and pretty young woman who majored in business administration. Although she expected to marry one day and raise a family, she was looking forward to having a career first and she wasn’t in any hurry to settle down. She had a great deal of confidence then and didn’t plan to settle down until she was in her mid-twenties at least.
    But that was before she met Bill Jensen. Sandy-haired Bill was six feet four inches tall, with an athlete’s muscular build, not an inch of fat on him. Sue was a sophomore when she went to a meeting of the scuba diving club on campus. That’s where she met Bill.
    She was awed by the way Bill Jensen took over a room. “He was a great talker,” she recalled, “and he seemed well informed on so many subjects. He wasn’t somebody you could ignore. He really impressed me. He weighed less than two hundred pounds then, and he was in good shape.”
    Sue was almost twenty, and she assumed Bill was older than she was. She was surprised to learn that he was actually eighteen months younger. She found him quite handsome and she hoped to see him again. It seemed to be fate when she ran into him again when one of her girlfriend’s dates had a party in his dorm.
    When Sue arrived, she discovered that Bill also lived in that dorm and he was at the party. She was happy when he asked to walk her back to her dorm after the party, and delighted when he asked for her phone number.
    “It would have been at the end of October 1975 when we met,” Sue said. “I remember because