Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

to take care of him. State social workers stepped in to decide where he should go. He went first to his maternal grandparents, but then was placed in a foster home from the age of seven to eleven.
    After that, he lived in California with his mother and stepfather for just two months after his eighteen-year-old sister spirited him away from a foster home and drove him to his mother’s house.
    “Bill had three full sisters and one half sister,” Sue said. “His sisters were a lot older than he was and married young, so they were on their own.”
    Bill didn’t meet his half sister, Wanda, * until he was thirty-three. Before that, he didn’t even know what her last name was. Because his sisters were much older than he, he lived with his oldest sister, Iris, * when he was in junior high school. He suspected that he was taken in as a live-in babysitter rather than because his sister cared about him.
    Being poor was a constant worry for Bill; most of the foster parents he lived with subsisted on a bare-minimum standard of living. He would remember one foster home where meals often consisted of catsup sandwiches.
    Although he seldom talked about it to Sue, Bill occasionally mentioned that he had suffered both physical and emotional abuse when he was a child, and it’s likely that is true. As soon as he was old enough, Bill went to work. He washed dishes and bused tables at local restaurants to earn a little spending money.
    Bill’s name wasn’t Jensen then; he used his father’s surname: Pate. Still, he never really felt that he belonged to his birth family. By the time he was sixteen, he was living with distant relatives. His third cousin was the mayor of Poulsbo, where most of the citizens were Scandinavian.
    Bill became very active in the Lutheran church in Poulsbo, where he was a camp counselor and Lutheran youth president.
    While the mayor’s home was meticulously clean and there was plenty to eat, Bill wasn’t happy because the rules were very strict. Once more, he was convinced that he had been accepted out of duty, and not because the mayor and his wife had any particular affection for him. And he chafed at the rules that seemed to have no reasons behind them other than to mete out discipline.
    After he’d lived with the mayor and his wife for a year, Bill formed a powerful bond with a complete stranger: he was shooting at targets on a rifle range when he met a man of about fifty, who told Bill that he had just retired from the navy as a lieutenant commander. The two had a long conversation, and the retired navy man was quite taken with Bill.
    Despite his rough childhood—or perhaps because of it—Bill had developed a charismatic façade, and he made an excellent, very likable first impression. His intelligence impressed his new friend. Bill joked as he complained about his suffocating home life, but the older man, whose name was Chuck Jensen, felt kind of sorry for him. Jensen’s background was something of a mystery, but he apparently had no family he was close to. He was on his own when Bill met him. Bill and Chuck Jensen became friends.
    After they had known each other for a few weeks, Jensen realized how miserable Bill was in the regimented home of the mayor, and he offered the teenager a home—no strings attached. Bill accepted quickly.
    Chuck Jensen set about teaching Bill manners, bought him some nice clothes, and acted as his surrogate father. Like young Bill, Chuck was something of a loner. He lived in a mobile home surrounded by acres of land. Jensen encouraged Bill in his lifelong ambition to be a cop.
    One day, Bill would tell Sue Harris that he couldn’t even remember when he hadn’t been drawn to police work. At sixteen, he planned to go to college to get his degree in criminal justice, join a police department, and eventually become a special agent in the FBI.
    Bill had to budget carefully to pay for college; Washington State University was known for its superior criminal justice curriculum and, indeed, was the only college that offered a four-year program at the time he graduated from high school. He had some veteran’s benefits from his father’s wartime service in the navy. Chuck Jensen also helped him, and he obtained some student loans. Besides his part-time jobs in Pullman, he worked summers for the Mason County Sheriff’s Office on the Olympic Peninsula in an intern program offered there. He wasn’t old enough to be a deputy, but he worked as a dispatcher in the mostly