Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

way he was handling things, I could take over if I wanted to—and I always backed down. I knew he was better at it than I could be. That time in December 1988, Scott was only two months old, he was still on the heart monitor, and Bill and I were both nervous. And I wanted so much to have a happy family. I thought we could work it out.”
    As the nineties approached, Bill was part of a close family. Besides Sue, Jenny, and Scott, he was always welcome at Carol’s home. They all got together at Thanksgiving and Christmas. His wife loved him, his children adored him, and his sister-in-law and her fiancé were happy to see him coming.
    Sue’s main ambition in life was to be the best mother she could be, and she loved being home with Jenny and Scott. She continued to volunteer for any activity they were in where a mother was needed—from room mother to Scouts.
    Bill got Jenny started with basketball in kindergarten and coached her teams all the way to sixth grade. They began baseball when Jenny was in the second grade. Bill was the coach for both sports, and she was proud to have her dad out there coaching. Jenny would remember their winning record, and that her girlfriends really liked her father. “He was a great coach, and it was fun!”
    Sometimes, though, the Jensens’ marriage was less fun.
    In 1986, Sue and Bill had gone to counseling, a requirement after the domestic violence report when Bill had smashed the figurine. That early report said that it was “likely” that Sue was suffering from Battered Woman’s syndrome, but Bill’s stance in the few sessions he attended was that it was Sue who needed “fixing.” Their psychologist felt that she and Bill did need marriage counseling, but it was hollow advice because both of them needed to participate fully if they hoped to save an increasingly combative marriage. But no amount of coaxing from Sue could get Bill to open up in front of a marriage counselor.
    Sue and Bill continued to argue, but they always made up. Inevitably, Sue blamed herself, wishing that she hadn’t said the wrong thing and annoyed him, or that she hadn’t been so quick to argue with him. She was anything but a mousy wife; she was an active combatant. Still, there were a lot of good times between the difficult spaces. The Jensens took family vacations, camped out, and they all enjoyed the kids’ sports.
    Yet the incidents of physical abuse continued. Each time, after he’d hurt her, Bill told Sue it was her fault. She had made him angry enough to use force on her. Her perception of the world began to change; she looked at happy marriages around her and wondered what she was doing wrong. She began to blame herself for all the problems she and Bill faced.
    Being married to a cop is never easy for a wife. There is always the fear that when they leave to go out on a shift, they may not come back. Some officers share what happens on the job with their wives, but most tend to keep it to themselves, trying hard to separate their home life from those things they see out on the streets.
    Knowing that their husbands are often the objects of flirtation from other women who are attracted to the uniform, a lot of wives are either jealous or filled with anxiety. Socially, cops are treated differently by “civilians,” who approach them at parties to try to get tickets fixed or complain about some injustice they feel they’ve suffered at the hands of the police. That’s the reason cops tend to stick together, socializing with one another in venues where they don’t feel as though they’re under a microscope.
    But Bill Jensen still didn’t socialize with his fellow officers. Although there is almost always solidarity in police agencies and cops officially have one another’s backs on the job, Bill didn’t have any more close friends in the sheriff’s office than he had had in college.
    There was something about him that turned other deputies off—perhaps his tendency toward braggadocio, his know-it-all attitude, or his quick temper.
    Bill continued to be transferred laterally within the department. After he graduated from the police academy in December 1979, he was assigned to the Burien Precinct near Sea-Tac Airport, where he worked a patrol car for about eight months. Next, he drove a “highway car,” where he was on call in a thirty-block area.
    “Basically, you’re in charge,” he explained later in his usual self-aggrandizing manner. “The reason they selected me for that was