Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

hoped there could be a way that he could come home, and that they could go back to the early days with a father who had seemed to care about them, but Bill appeared to have no conception of the pain they were in. He told Jenny on one visit, in February 2002, that her mother and aunt “deserved to die” for what they had done to him. When she asked him about the girl he was living with, he said he did have a new girlfriend, but that it was none of her business. And then he called his teenage daughter a “selfish piece of shit” before he pushed her out the door of his apartment.
    Jenny was devastated.
    Bill warned Scott, still only twelve, that he should be prepared for both his parents to die because it was likely that they would.
    Sue did her best to bind up the emotional wounds Bill continually inflicted on their children.
    As 2002 began, she had a new attorney. John Compatore was an ex-cop himself, a kind but tough man who was not easily intimidated. Compatore had the order of protection against Bill Jensen reinstated on July 26, 2002, but the Jensens’ divorce was no closer to being finalized in 2002 than it had been a year earlier.
    Sue counted on her sister, Carol, and her friends to find some sort of peace in her life—but as 2002 drifted toward autumn, she found herself moving from frustration to fear. She knew Bill, and she knew that he always got even with anyone he thought had wronged him.
    And now, she was the enemy.
    I have a large file drawer full of e-mails and letters from scores of desperate exes who have long since given up on love; they hope only to live their lives without having to look over their shoulders to catch someone following them, not waking in the dead of night at the slightest sound and lying in the dark, scarcely breathing, wondering if someone has crept into their homes.
    Sue Jensen had become one of those people.
    In September, Sue walked out to get her morning paper and realized that there was a big vacant spot in her driveway. She saw that the Sequoia SUV was gone again. She knew who had taken it. That SUV was a major bone of contention with Bill. He had wanted it from the very beginning. They were still together, of course, when they’d bought it, but Sue had discovered that Bill had deleted her name from the title. Now she understood why. He had apparently bided his time until she felt safe enough to park it in her own driveway, and then taken it back.
    “You’ll never find it now,” a friend told her. “It’s gone for good.”
    Because she had been given the Sequoia in their first divorce hearing, Sue—who made the insurance payments on it and all their other possessions—should have been in line for the insurance payment on a stolen vehicle. It could have been stolen by someone other than her estranged husband, but Sue doubted that.
    She got on the Internet and began a search for someone who might be trying to sell a Sequoia. She found nothing in the state of Washington. She kept trying, and at the end of October 2002, Sue located a Sequoia SUV that had been sold to a dealership in Beaverton, Oregon. The color, model, and description were right. When she checked on the VIN (vehicle identification number), she knew she had found the SUV stolen from her.
    Told that she probably couldn’t get it back because her name wasn’t on the title, and that she would likely be forfeiting the insurance payment, too, she shook her head impatiently. “I don’t care—it’s the right thing to do.”
    She never saw the Sequoia again, but she eventually was recompensed by her insurance company.
    Christmas 2002 was bleak. The old traditions seemed to mock Sue, Jenny, and Scott. The year ahead seemed to hold danger instead of promise.
    Sue Jensen now firmly believed that she was going to “end up dead” when Bill finally reached his boiling point. That would be his “final word,” the revenge he always sought. She hadn’t spoken to him in months, but she discovered on New Year’s Eve that Bill had canceled their medical insurance. Sue couldn’t apply under her own name until she was legally divorced, and it could be catastrophic for them to risk going without it. When Scott called Bill the first week in January 2003, she picked up the phone.
    “I told him all he had to do was e-mail the insurance company and we would be reinstated.”
    With Scott’s continuing medical expenses, they desperately needed to have medical coverage. They argued. And Sue made a terrible