Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

gist of his lawyer’s questions.
    “Yes.”
    “My intention was to put Carrothers away for the rest of his life.”
    It seemed that the defense attorney was dragging information out of Bill Jensen. His answers were short and slow.
    “Why is that?” Conroy asked.
    “Because I could not even stand the man even suggesting what he was suggesting.”
    Jensen said he knew of Carrothers’s reputation, had heard enough about his so-called abilities, and he was incensed.
    “And then it became your intention to do what—a reverse sting?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What did you do in an effort to accomplish this particular task?”
    “There came a specific day around July 1 when I realized…that this man was serious about wanting to kill my family. I then started taking notes about everything that he said, and everything that was done.”
    “And what was your plan, then?”
    “I wanted to build a good enough case against him so that I could go to the Seattle Police, report him, and also talk to the prosecutor about a trade on my current charges—if I brought him Mr. Carrothers.”
    This was Bill Jensen’s defense.
    He told the jurors how very difficult it had been for him to befriend someone like Yancy Carrothers. “It was extremely hard,” he sighed, “but I did it.”
    Not only was Bill Jensen giving himself a unique defense—the reverse sting defense—but he was depicting himself as a hero, sickened by his daily contact with a man like Carrothers but soldiering on nevertheless.
    “Toward that end,” Conroy asked, “did you then give him details about your wife and your kids and where they lived?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    While that bizarre answer sank into the minds of those observing, the defendant was excused and another witness took the stand. This man was also an alumnus of the eleventh floor ad seg tank. He swore that he had warned Bill Jensen that Yancy Carrothers was not to be trusted. That, of course, would bolster the defense position that Jensen had never intended to have his family destroyed. Far from it.
    Marilyn Brenneman could not ask this prisoner about his past—the defense had won this one in a sidebar argument. Jensen’s supporter had a record of sex offenses against a minor, but the jurors never heard that.
    The witness supported Jensen’s contention that he was doing his own undercover operation, fully aware that Yancy wore a snitch jacket.
    But why had he taken such chances with the lives of the intended victims? Bill Jensen had given a man he believed to be a killer a virtual road map to his family.
    Back on the stand, Jensen said he had taken voluminous notes on each day’s conversation with Yancy as part of his reverse sting operation. In fact, he said, those notes were right there in the courtroom, on the defense table. This came as a surprise to his defense attorney—and to Cheryl Snow and Marilyn Brenneman. The notes had not been provided in discovery. Apparently no one was aware of Jensen’s notes—except for Jensen himself.
    The prosecutors were quite sure he had written these notes during his trial, after listening to testimony, so that he would have them to substantiate his claim that he’d been only a detective trying to trap a potential killer. They had watched him scribbling frantically at the defense table.
    As Jim Conroy questioned him, Bill Jensen disclosed more of the minute details he had provided to Yancy Carrothers—right down to cell phone numbers. Anyone armed with that intelligence could have located the four intended victims easily.
    Why had he been so specific, and why had he given a man he believed to be a killer the real information? Couldn’t he have given him fake addresses and vehicle descriptions? Conroy obviously saw a problem there, and questioned his client about it.
    “Well,” Jensen responded to his attorney’s questions, “I was quite convinced that you could not arrest or charge somebody for [having] fictitious names and addresses. I started at one and kind of went up to three as I made the calculation, knowing I had to give this to him in case he…somehow verified it. Plus, I knew he wasn’t going to be able to do the hit without all the down payment.”
    It was an almost confabulated answer.
    Answering Conroy’s questions, Bill Jensen was saying exactly the same things that Yancy Carrothers had testified to—all the money discussed, all the possible MOs—only the defendant insisted this had all been part of his own efforts to get