Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

had been seriously damaged, more than anyone realized at the time. His back was injured, and his right ring finger had also been damaged. In most professions, that injury wouldn’t have been particularly significant—unless it happened to a concert violinist or a police officer. Bill was right-handed, and he could no longer trust his aim when firing a gun.
    Several times when he was driving after the incident, he was unable to move his foot from the accelerator to the brake. Again, law enforcement officers need to be capable of pursuit driving at high speeds and to have lightning-quick responses. Bill had been expert at that, but he wasn’t any longer.
    Bill had two surgeries on his right knee, and his physician reportedly told him he was too young to have a third, for fear he might end up in a wheelchair at an early age. When he walked, Bill’s patella (kneecap) clicked. A complete knee replacement would last only ten to twelve years, and his doctor wasn’t sure another replacement when Bill was only fifty would be advisable.
    Bill Jensen could not help but remember how his Australian friend’s police career had ended, or how much pain he had suffered after his leg was broken—and then amputated. Now, something similar had happened to him.
    For all intents and purposes, Bill Jensen’s dream of becoming an FBI special agent was now impossible. He had always planned to be a cop; he’d made it, and just before the age of forty his career might be ending. He didn’t have enough years in to get his full retirement.
    It was at this point in Bill Jensen’s life that tremendous changes washed like acid over the Jensen family. Bill’s newest obsession was about his health, his disablement, and his pain. He thought of nothing else.
    In slow increments, Bill had changed so much that the man Sue had fallen in love with in 1975 was unrecognizable. The slender young man had long since vanished. Even before he was injured, Bill had put on more than a hundred pounds, much of it around his waist. His weight problems now became a vicious circle. Because it hurt to walk, he moved as little as possible, rarely exercising. He no longer coached Jenny’s basketball and baseball teams but sat, instead, in the stands. When he moved, it was with an exaggerated limp.
    And the less Bill Jensen exercised, the more weight he gained. He had reached 350 pounds, and was now headed toward four hundred. Sue had put on about twenty pounds, but she looked essentially as she had when they were first married. It wasn’t Bill’s appearance, though, that made her wonder where their marriage was going; it was his moodiness and his complete self-absorption, which put a pall over the whole family.
     
    Bill had always been a man who held grudges, keeping track of those who he felt had wronged him. Now, since he believed he was almost totally disabled by his knee injury, he made plans to sue his insurance company for $1.7 million. The King County Sheriff’s Office respected his almost twenty years as a deputy and offered him “light duty” at the sheriff’s office for a few days a week. It was essentially desk work; it wasn’t really being a cop—not to Bill Jensen.
    He retired from the King County Sheriff’s Office in September 1999.
    Bill grew more bitter as the months passed, and he blamed everyone around him for his personal knee-injury disaster. He spent most of his days and nights sitting in a recliner chair watching television, angry at the fugitive who had maimed him, angry at his wife, angry at his children, angry at his fellow cops, angry at the whole world.
    Impatient, he scoffed at exercises that might have helped in his physical rehabilitation. He wore a heavy brace on his knee and walked with an exaggerated limp. His doctor referred him to the University of Washington Pain Clinic, but he walked in one door and out the other, denying the possibility that he could get along without pain pills. “It’s just not going to work.”
    Sue sensed that things weren’t right. Bill was starting to take too many of the painkillers that had been prescribed for him, although, initially, he didn’t appear to be negatively affected. The pills weren’t helping. He still complained of pain continually.
    “It got to the point,” Sue recalled, “that if he didn’t take the pain pills, you’d wish he would have.”
    As Bill moved ahead with his suit against the insurance company, Sue agreed, at his insistence, to participate in a video