Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

to Bellevue.
    They set their wedding date for May 5, 1979, right before Bill’s twenty-third birthday. Even though Bill was now an adult, Chuck Jensen had legally adopted him in February. From then on, Bill’s legal name was Bill Jensen.
    Sue knew that his relationship with his family was nothing like her own, and her mother and sister did, too, so they made sure he felt welcome in their family. If only being accepted into a warm and loving clan when one is an adult could make up for emotional abuse and deprivation in childhood, Bill Jensen might well have been a happy and successful man.
    Still, it’s almost impossible to build self-esteem atop a shaky foundation. Bill Jensen’s life during the vital years between one and six, when a child is forming his own view of the world, was one of abuse and abandonment. As gruff and dominating as he appeared, he wasn’t a man who felt confident inside.
    He hid it well. He often told Sue, “I’m a survivor.” Whenever they had problems, he added, “ We’ll get through this.”
    In the beginning, Sue found his “survivor” declarations endearing. And she always thought he said, “We’ll get through this,” although there were times when she wondered if he’d actually meant, “ I’ll get through this.”
    Bill had already survived a lot, and there were events that kept reminding him of the turmoil he had come from. His mother died in the summer of 1977, and Sue remembered a bizarre experience when she accompanied Bill to the funeral in California. She was about to meet his family for the first time.
    During the wake, the mourners imbibed heavily, and most were intoxicated as the day ended. Bill had rented a car and he and Sue offered to give two of his sisters a ride after the wake. Almost from the moment his sisters got into the backseat of his car, they began to fight about which of them had loved their mother more. Their verbal abuse quickly escalated to a physical fight.
    “I couldn’t believe it,” Sue said. “They were actually scratching each other and pulling hair. I looked at Bill and the veins in his neck were just bulging because he was so angry. These were grown women who were almost a decade older than he was.”
    And then Bill Jensen suddenly whipped his car into a gas station, opened the back doors, and tossed his screaming sisters out. He left them there. How they would get home was anyone’s guess, but he didn’t care, and Sue couldn’t really blame him for feeling that way.
    Sue wasn’t all that surprised when Bill told her he didn’t want her inviting his sisters to their wedding, although she asked him if he was sure he wanted to leave them out.
    “They’ll just ruin it,” he explained. “You saw how they behaved at my mother’s funeral.”
    Indeed she had, and she didn’t want their wedding to end up in a free-for-all. Bill’s oldest sister was almost as tall as he was, an inch or so over six feet in her stocking feet, and there were some people around Bremerton who nicknamed her “Wild Iris” for her short fuse.
    In the end, Bill convinced Sue not to send wedding invitations to any of his birth family.
    Sue and Bill’s wedding in the Mercer Island Covenant Church was a lovely event, albeit without the presence of his relatives—except for Chuck Jensen, and Sue thought of him as her new father-in-law. Bill had two friends he’d made in high school, and he asked one of them to be his best man. The rest of the wedding party was made up of Sue’s family and friends.
    Their marriage started out well. Sue and Bill had a great honeymoon. Bill and Chuck converted an old but sturdy Chevy van into a self-contained camper, and the newlyweds traveled around the United States in it for six weeks. Gas was relatively cheap then, and they cooked on the road and slept in the van. They had both worked hard in college, and their honeymoon was a relaxing and bonding time for them.
    “Bill applied at some police departments before we left,” Sue said. “He had an outstanding résumé, and while we were on the road, he got a message that his interview at the King County Sheriff’s Office had gone so well that they were going to hire him.”
    But the King County personnel office told Bill he could finish his honeymoon—he didn’t have to come right back to Seattle: he could join the fall class of basic police school in September of 1979.
    He was due to graduate in December, and they would start the new decade with Bill’s ambition to