Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

“stand-up guy,” albeit sometimes given to fisticuffs when he came in intoxicated.
    On June 2, 2004, over Marilyn Brenneman’s and Cheryl Snow’s fervent objections, James Conroy brought Jenny and Scott Jensen into the trial to testify. It was a fruitless and sad decision. Neither of them was on the stand for more than a few moments, and they had nothing to add that might help the defense. They identified the defendant as their father, their voices choked with tears.
     
    Ten days after his trial began, Bill Jensen took the witness stand.
    It was Wednesday morning, June 2. His attorney led him through a lengthy description of his years as a police officer, his service to the community, the years he coached softball and basketball, and moved on to his disabling injury, suffered when he chased a wanted man out of the courthouse in Issaquah.
    He spoke with enthusiasm of his second career teaching computer science. Conroy interrupted him before he explained why he hadn’t stayed with that job, leaving the impression that it had been a successful venture.
    He asked Jensen about the deposition where he had made the “slashing motion” across his neck.
    “Mr. Jensen, what were you trying to do when you did that?”
    “I was trying to push my wife’s buttons,” he answered easily.
    “She described it as a very stupid thing to do. How would you describe it?”
    “A stupid thing to do. It was. She was laughing at me, you know, and it was a very immature, childish thing to do.”
    Jim Conroy asked Bill Jensen about another alleged threat to Sue: “ ‘I’ll tell you the same thing I told my attorney—if I go to jail, you’ll go to your grave.’ Do you remember saying that?”
    “I don’t remember saying that at all. Quite often, both of us would be talking at the same time…. I remember saying something about ‘You’re going to hell if you don’t behave.’ ”
    Bill Jensen appeared puzzled, unable to recall that particular argument. “Could she have misunderstood me? Gosh, if I was going to kill somebody, I sure wouldn’t be telling my attorney first. It didn’t make any sense.”
    And that “misunderstanding” was, Jensen said, what had caused him to end up in jail for “felony telephone harassment,” a “silly, Class C felony.”
    The questioning moved swiftly to Bill Jensen’s first meeting with Yancy Carrothers. He insisted that he’d been warned from the beginning that Yancy was a snitch, and not to be trusted. He knew this, he said, before Yancy even came to the tank where he was being held.
    Slowly, the defense strategy was emerging. Jensen said that no one on the tier was aware that he had been a police officer for twenty years. And that he had not approached Yancy; it was the other way around.
    “The first time he came up to me was with his artwork. He really wanted me to look at his artwork that he does in his cell. He made a big deal out of that, you know, and then he was really paying me a lot of attention.”
    “As time progressed, what did Mr. Carrothers do?”
    “He offered to kill my wife for money.”
    “Why did he do that?”
    Cheryl Snow objected repeatedly to questions that required the defendant to speculate about Yancy Carrothers’s motivation, and Judge Jones sustained them.
    Conroy moved on to suggest that Bill Jensen must have been angry and upset when he arrived on the tier.
    “Oh, yes, I was. Definitely.”
    “And Mr. Carrothers volunteered to help you?”
    “Yes, he did.”
    “How often would he come to you and volunteer to assist you with your problems?”
    “Almost every day. And you know, it started with him apologizing to me about overhearing or eavesdropping on my conversations I had on the phone, which is within earshot of his cell.”
    Led by his counsel’s questions, Bill Jensen testified that Yancy Carrothers had gone to great lengths to describe his abilities in certain areas, and repeated that he could “help him out.” He had asked questions about the defendant’s family.
    “Did you believe that he was trying to kill your family?”
    “Yes, I believe that was what he was going to do.”
    Jensen’s position was that he was locked up in jail, hounded by a stranger who was determined to kill his family, a stranger who started out asking for $30,000 for each person.
    “What was your intention at that juncture insofar as this particular conversation?”
    “My intentions?” Jensen sounded confused. Often, it took him a beat to pick up the