Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

Carol chose the University of Washington in Seattle, but Sue picked Washington State University in Pullman, Washington, on the eastern side of the state. There, more than three hundred miles away from the Seattle area, the hills of the Palouse roll on endlessly, the soil and weather perfect for fields of golden, undulating wheat. The summers were blazing hot, while the winters brought frigid temperatures and deep snowdrifts. It was another world, and Sue Harris loved it.
    Sue was a smart and pretty young woman who majored in business administration. Although she expected to marry one day and raise a family, she was looking forward to having a career first and she wasn’t in any hurry to settle down. She had a great deal of confidence then and didn’t plan to settle down until she was in her mid-twenties at least.
    But that was before she met Bill Jensen. Sandy-haired Bill was six feet four inches tall, with an athlete’s muscular build, not an inch of fat on him. Sue was a sophomore when she went to a meeting of the scuba diving club on campus. That’s where she met Bill.
    She was awed by the way Bill Jensen took over a room. “He was a great talker,” she recalled, “and he seemed well informed on so many subjects. He wasn’t somebody you could ignore. He really impressed me. He weighed less than two hundred pounds then, and he was in good shape.”
    Sue was almost twenty, and she assumed Bill was older than she was. She was surprised to learn that he was actually eighteen months younger. She found him quite handsome and she hoped to see him again. It seemed to be fate when she ran into him again when one of her girlfriend’s dates had a party in his dorm.
    When Sue arrived, she discovered that Bill also lived in that dorm and he was at the party. She was happy when he asked to walk her back to her dorm after the party, and delighted when he asked for her phone number.
    “It would have been at the end of October 1975 when we met,” Sue said. “I remember because my friends and I went to Spokane the next day—Saturday—and when I got back to my room, there was a note from Bill on my door reminding me to set my clock back because daylight saving time was ending. He added his phone number and said there was a chilled bottle of wine waiting, and asked me to call him when I got home.”
    Bill Jensen launched into a whirlwind courtship, and Sue still thinks of that fall at Washington State University as being a very happy time. Bill struck her as very mature and extremely confident, someone she could depend on. The first time he called her at her home in Newport Hills, her mother handed her the phone, saying, “It’s for you. It sounds like one of your professors.”
    But it was Bill, and his voice did have that air of authority. He seemed such a solid and dependable guy, and Sue respected his determination to finish college even though he didn’t have much money. Like Sue, he worked in the dorm dining room to help pay expenses. He also worked for Safeway in their beverage plant as a warehouseman, and later as a store detective. Bill managed to earn good grades—particularly in any course required for a degree in criminal justice, his major. In those classes, he got As and Bs.
    He wrote two outstanding term papers in 1977 and 1978: “Jail Security” and the more ambitious “Socio-Psychological Profile of Becoming a Corrupt Police Officer.”
    When Sue brought him home to Newport Hills for Thanksgiving, her family welcomed him. And by her birthday, December 8, Bill had asked her to marry him.
    To her own surprise, she found herself saying yes.
    Bill Jensen’s background was very different from Sue’s. Born in May 1957, he’d grown up in the area around Bremerton, Washington, and the huge naval station there. There was precious little stability in his early years. From the time he was little, he was bounced from one home to another, moving through a series of relatives’ homes and sometimes even foster homes.
    Bill’s father was fifty-seven when he was born, and he had fathered several daughters by different women. He wasn’t around much when Bill was small because he was in the navy and out to sea a lot. He was a mythic, heroic figure to Bill, who bragged that his father’s ship had been under siege at Pearl Harbor.
    Bill’s mother was much younger, but she was an alcoholic, and her parenting skills were sketchy at best. When Bill was five his father died, and his mother wasn’t in any shape