Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder Read Free Page A

my friends and I went to Spokane the next day—Saturday—and when I got back to my room, there was a note from Bill on my door reminding me to set my clock back because daylight saving time was ending. He added his phone number and said there was a chilled bottle of wine waiting, and asked me to call him when I got home.”
    Bill Jensen launched into a whirlwind courtship, and Sue still thinks of that fall at Washington State University as being a very happy time. Bill struck her as very mature and extremely confident, someone she could depend on. The first time he called her at her home in Newport Hills, her mother handed her the phone, saying, “It’s for you. It sounds like one of your professors.”
    But it was Bill, and his voice did have that air of authority. He seemed such a solid and dependable guy, and Sue respected his determination to finish college even though he didn’t have much money. Like Sue, he worked in the dorm dining room to help pay expenses. He also worked for Safeway in their beverage plant as a warehouseman, and later as a store detective. Bill managed to earn good grades—particularly in any course required for a degree in criminal justice, his major. In those classes, he got As and Bs.
    He wrote two outstanding term papers in 1977 and 1978: “Jail Security” and the more ambitious “Socio-Psychological Profile of Becoming a Corrupt Police Officer.”
    When Sue brought him home to Newport Hills for Thanksgiving, her family welcomed him. And by her birthday, December 8, Bill had asked her to marry him.
    To her own surprise, she found herself saying yes.
    Bill Jensen’s background was very different from Sue’s. Born in May 1957, he’d grown up in the area around Bremerton, Washington, and the huge naval station there. There was precious little stability in his early years. From the time he was little, he was bounced from one home to another, moving through a series of relatives’ homes and sometimes even foster homes.
    Bill’s father was fifty-seven when he was born, and he had fathered several daughters by different women. He wasn’t around much when Bill was small because he was in the navy and out to sea a lot. He was a mythic, heroic figure to Bill, who bragged that his father’s ship had been under siege at Pearl Harbor.
    Bill’s mother was much younger, but she was an alcoholic, and her parenting skills were sketchy at best. When Bill was five his father died, and his mother wasn’t in any shape to take care of him. State social workers stepped in to decide where he should go. He went first to his maternal grandparents, but then was placed in a foster home from the age of seven to eleven.
    After that, he lived in California with his mother and stepfather for just two months after his eighteen-year-old sister spirited him away from a foster home and drove him to his mother’s house.
    “Bill had three full sisters and one half sister,” Sue said. “His sisters were a lot older than he was and married young, so they were on their own.”
    Bill didn’t meet his half sister, Wanda, * until he was thirty-three. Before that, he didn’t even know what her last name was. Because his sisters were much older than he, he lived with his oldest sister, Iris, * when he was in junior high school. He suspected that he was taken in as a live-in babysitter rather than because his sister cared about him.
    Being poor was a constant worry for Bill; most of the foster parents he lived with subsisted on a bare-minimum standard of living. He would remember one foster home where meals often consisted of catsup sandwiches.
    Although he seldom talked about it to Sue, Bill occasionally mentioned that he had suffered both physical and emotional abuse when he was a child, and it’s likely that is true. As soon as he was old enough, Bill went to work. He washed dishes and bused tables at local restaurants to earn a little spending money.
    Bill’s name wasn’t Jensen then; he used his father’s