Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

evidence against Yancy.
    He plunged on in his testimony, leaping ahead of his lawyer’s questions. Jensen boasted that he had even given Carrothers a way out. He had exaggerated the amount of his inheritance.
    “In my own mind, I’m a person of fair play; give the person an opportunity to back out. I wanted many, many a back door to leave if he wasn’t committed. So I gave it to him. That was a pretty serious doubt I thought I planted in his mind. It also helped me to gauge his greed. I was really after his greed—just like, in my opinion, a miner might think there’s gold someplace, but not have a lot of evidence.”
    All the while, Jensen said he had needed a lot of evidence himself before he felt ready to go to the police and the prosecutor. He said now that he had been suspicious of “Lisa,” finding her younger than he expected. “That was why I cut short my first meeting—conversation—with her. She was a whole lot more intelligent, brighter, pretty, young looking. What is she doing running around with Carrothers? It doesn’t fit.”
    Conroy managed to get in a question. “Did you have a protracted conversation with her on the twenty-sixth? And why?”
    Jensen nodded. “I wanted her to thoroughly believe that I wanted to go forward with this complete plan. I wanted to hook her.”
    “Did you purposely interject details so that you could recount those details?”
    “Yeah.” Jensen asked to see his notes. He was so transparent. It was obvious he had written the notes during Sharon Stevens’s testimony—so that his own testimony would match hers, only with his own spin on it.
    He repeated many times that he had simply been building a tight case to take to the police. He had deliberately tried to put Lisa at ease, Jensen said, once again adhering to Stevens’s testimony.
    Cheryl Snow objected; Bill Jensen was now literally reading his notes. He denied constructing the notes in the courtroom, and angrily shouted at Cheryl Snow when she suggested that, “You’re a liar!”
    But it wasn’t easy to believe him. Several jurors looked at him with disbelief. The suspicious notes were on the same type of paper that had been in front of him all during the first ten days of testimony.
    Judge Jones sustained Snow’s objection, and Jim Conroy reminded his client that he must not read. He should be testifying only to what he remembered.
    When he finally was confronted by Detective Cloyd Steiger at the time of his arrest, Jensen testified, he’d been “very, very taken aback” by Steiger’s attitude.
    “Did you ever have any intentions whatsoever of actually carrying through with some plot to kill your family?” Conroy asked.
    “Never. I love my kids. I still kind of love my wife. She’s the mother of my kids. There’s no way that I was ever going to let anybody hurt them. But, boy, from where I was at, I wanted to put him away—”
    “Mr. Carrothers?”
    “Yeah. Mr. Carrothers. I wanted to put Mr. Carrothers away for life.”
    “No further questions.”
     
    Cheryl Snow rose to cross-examine Bill Jensen. “You stated that you didn’t feel Detective Steiger was going to listen to anything you told him about all of this undercover work that you had been doing for the last month? Is that correct?”
    “I did not feel that Detective Steiger would have listened to me at all,” the defendant said stiffly.
    “You had been waiting, you say—you tell us today while you’re under oath to tell the truth, tell us that for two months you conducted what you call a ‘reverse sting’ operation? Correct?”
    “Yeah, that’s what I like to call it. He’s trying to get me to pony up some money for a crime that I really don’t think he’s going to commit. So I reverse it.”
    Snow’s tone was full of doubt. “You state that you just kept waiting because you kept thinking, ‘I hope I get enough information so I can eventually go to the Seattle Police Department.’ Correct?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “Yet when you meet Detective Steiger face-to-face…You meet two detectives on July 28 and there’s your big moment to turn over all your information about this undercover operation you’ve been running, and you tell them nothing ?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “Not a thing?”
    “That’s correct.”
    “And it wasn’t until today that, for the first time, you pulled those notes out of Lord knows where—and offered them to this Court? Is that correct?”
    Trickles of sweat had begun to