Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

challenge for Cloyd Steiger and Marilyn Brenneman because it was difficult to tape on both sides of the glass partitions in the visiting area. They got help with that from Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, who arranged to be in the control room near the jail elevators, where they could view the visiting area.
    DEA agent Terry Damon handed the tape of Sharon Stevens’s entire conversation, with Bill Jensen captured on it, to Cloyd Steiger. While he played it back, he simultaneously made a copy of it, and then put the original in an evidence envelope marked with “Case No. 03-340145,” his name, William Jensen’s name, and “Digital micro-cassette, recorded during undercover operation.”
    One day, a jury would listen to it—all the instructions for murder, including Jensen’s conscienceless phrase “Well, my suggestion…then is, Clean house. ”
    “Clean house” meant the murders of Sue, Carol, Jenny…and even Scott. Would Jensen’s children ever recover from the awful knowledge that their own father wanted them dead?
    Cloyd Steiger went to the eleventh floor of the King County Jail on July 29 and placed William Jensen under arrest for four counts of solicitation to commit murder.
    During the trial to come, responding to the defense attorney’s questions about his scornful attitude during the arrest, Steiger refused to apologize for his inability to hide his disgust for a man who had once been a fellow officer of the law.
    “I told him he was in an unusual predicament,” Steiger acknowledged. “In fact, I said, ‘Let me think of a word to describe it. Oh, yeah—you’re fucked. ’ It angered me that he was a former police officer—because that’s what everyone hears on the news. ‘Former police officer tries to kill family.’ I was insulted as a police officer.”
    Bill Jensen, who had considered himself a master at manipulating others to get what he wanted, was stunned to find that “Lisa” wasn’t who he had believed her to be.
    And he was even more astounded to learn that Yancy Carrothers, a man Jensen believed was no match for his superior intelligence, had broken his promise to keep a deadly secret.
     
    On July 29, 2003, King County prosecutor Norm Maleng charged William Jensen with four counts of attempted murder for hire in the conspiracy to kill Sue, her sister, Carol, Jenny, and Scott.
    That news was the lead story on all of Seattle’s evening television broadcasts.
    At last.
    What had been roiling below the surface, the concentrated efforts to destroy Sue Jensen and everyone she loved, was finally exposed to the light of day.
    It was a painful night for the Jensens and Carol Harris. They clung together, bolstering one another and joined by friends who loved them. It was very, very difficult to see their story play across television screens. Tabloid shows and newspapers were calling for interviews.
    Dirty cops are fodder for the media. Maybe Bill Jensen had forgotten what he had written about in his “A” term paper at Washington State University a quarter century earlier, “Socio-Psychological Profile of Becoming a Corrupt Police Officer.”
     
    It would be a long time before Bill Jensen went to trial. Prosecutors Cheryl Snow and Marilyn Brenneman would be the ones to face him in court. The fact that they were female—highly intelligent and attractive women—probably wouldn’t please him; he had habitually ranked women lower in his estimation than men. Given his resentment of his own mother, that probably was predictable.
    In the fall of 2003, Marilyn Brenneman suggested the possibility of a plea agreement, not for Bill Jensen’s sake but for Sue and their children. A plea would mean no trial, and there would be no appeals or uncertainty. The Department of Corrections could transfer him out of state to a prison where he would have no contact with people with ties to Washington, and it would reduce media coverage of a trial in the Seattle area.
    Even though a plea bargain would mean a shorter sentence for Bill Jensen, it was unlikely he would ever walk free. The possibility that he would live a long time in prison was slim. Marilyn Brenneman checked to see if he really did have chronic lymphocytic leukemia as he had claimed. When it came to his health, Jensen was like the boy who cried wolf. But in this instance he had been telling the truth.
    Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a cancer of the white blood cells and bone marrow, characterized by uncontrolled