Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

repeating what he told the police as if she had memorized it. Even though the girl had a record of arrests for shoplifting, forgery, and identity theft, her word was good enough to have Sue arrested.
    The nightmare was growing more bizarre.
    Scott would be alone until Jenny came home, and Sue was desperately upset at having to leave him, in shock to find herself being put into the backseat of a patrol car. She had gone on some errands at the strip mall near Bill’s apartment, but spying on him was the last thing she had any desire to do. She knew she could account for every place she had been that afternoon, but the police told her she would have to go to jail first, and provide that information in the morning.
    “Luckily,” she said, “we passed Jenny coming home, and they stopped and let me talk to her. She was more upset than I was, but she said she would call my sister and another friend, and see that someone would be at the house all night with them.”
    It seemed impossible; Sue had feared being killed, but she had never imagined that she would go to jail. But there she was, fingerprinted, mugged, strip-searched, and placed into a cell with other women in the King County Jail.
    She didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, the prosecutor’s office called down to the jail and said, “Get her out of there—now!”
    As it happened, Sue could indeed account for every minute of the afternoon of February 26. She had picked Scott up from middle school about 3:20, visited with his tutor until 3:45, purchased a prescription at the Coal Creek Shopping Center at 3:51, and gone to the Safeway supermarket; she had receipts with the times and date stamped on them. She had even run into several friends who remembered talking with her. When she returned home, she’d sent several e-mails, and they, of course, had the time and date on them.
    She never had to go to court on the alleged violation of Bill’s order of protection against her. But being right and having proof weren’t nearly enough to erase the fear that had begun to walk with Sue Jensen everywhere she went. She couldn’t sleep, and she broke out in hives.
    “Even the dog got hives,” she told a friend. “My hands shake so badly that I drop things all the time.”
    The dog—Sue’s beloved Great Dane—was one line of protection for her, about the only thing that allowed Sue to have a few hours of sleep at night.
    Sue felt that if she could go forward with her felony–domestic–violence charges against Bill, she might be able to find a modicum of safety. A year earlier she wouldn’t have had the nerve. Now she felt as if she had nothing to lose, and she wrote to Norm Maleng, the King County prosecutor, and to the King County Sheriff’s Office asking for help in bringing those charges against Bill.
    She contacted Diane Wetendorf, whose national organization helps domestic partners of the small percentage of police officers and firefighters who abuse the power that their careers give them.
    Wetendorf’s site (www.abuseofpower.info/Wetendorf.htm) has helped many victims who have hidden the domestic abuse they suffer, covering up their stories. Diane Wetendorf’s Web site declares its purpose:
    Our need to be heard
and to be visible is beginning to overcome
Our fear.
    We are breaking our silence.
    We are no longer invisible.
    We are not alone.
    And Sue did feel less alone, but she was no less frightened. Bill had not beaten her down as she knew he’d expected to do. She was on the offensive and that was infinitely dangerous. She didn’t want anything more than she had wanted in the beginning—only to be free, and to have enough of their family’s assets so she could take care of Scott and Jenny. But she knew instinctively that she couldn’t back down. Bill wouldn’t go away. He would bide his time, and then he would kill her.
    He had made that dread promise to her when he drew his finger across his neck, and when he told her she would go to her grave.
    Sue was getting pledges of support from the prosecutor, the sheriff, the county executive—but none of them seemed aware of the urgency she felt. She feared she might well be dead before those assurances were put into play.
    And then tragedy struck—a city away, a county away—to another woman who had tried in vain to divorce her policeman husband. The scenario was so familiar to Sue Jensen, it might well have been her story.
     
    Crystal Brame was thirty-five, the lovely young wife of David