Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

  Beginning in 1992, Bill had an additional assignment with the King County Sheriff’s Office: he was an emergency vehicle operations instructor. It was a natural for him, and one that fulfilled his need to be in a position of authority.

  “What my duties were was the training via my fellow peers, sergeants, and whoever. I took them out and they learned how to do pursuit driving and defensive driving,” he said proudly. “I really enjoyed that. It was a lot of fun, and I was really fairly decorated for that because I did a good job. It was a very intensive course. I think I can honestly say it was one of the most intensive courses I had ever taken, including college. I was kind of surprised how hard it was. Not everybody passed it.”

  Bill had a kind of blindness about how he came across to others. He was quick to brag and slow to compliment anyone else. He was the center of his own universe, focused only on himself. Even his children were a distant second, and his wife got even less affirmation.

  In the first seventeen years on the job, Bill Jensen was never elevated to detective—or even sergeant. He stayed in his one-man car on patrol. Over those years, Bill gradually but consistently put on weight, so that the lanky youth who graduated from Washington State University disappeared behind added pounds. He weighed more than three hundred pounds now.

  In 1997, Bill said he wanted a change of pace, and asked to be assigned as a court security officer in the Issaquah District Court. He had worked that area on patrol for years and wanted to get off the road. Issaquah is a mountain foothills town in the shadow of Snoqualmie Pass, located more than fifteen miles from the King County Sheriff’s Headquarters in downtown Seattle. It was an easy commute, however, from the Jensens’ home in Newport Hills.

  “I thought court duty would be kind of fun,” he commented. “I tried to stay on day shift as I got older—as a matter of it being easier with the family and sleep and everything.”

  His new assignment began on January 1, 1997. Jenny was almost twelve, and Scott was nearly eight. With their father working a day shift, they hoped to see more of him. Sue, too, wondered if Bill’s new assignment could somehow change the dynamics in their home in a positive way. At last they would all be living on the same basic schedule; she and the kids wouldn’t have to be alone during nighttime hours, and he could coach on weekends.

  The King County Journal, the east side’s newspaper, chose Bill Jensen as their “Hometown Hero” about this point in his career. Bill had met an injured ex-cop in Australia ten years earlier when the Jensen family was vacationing there. Bill and Graeme Dovaston became long-distance friends after that, and kept in touch with each other. Ironically (in light of what lay ahead for Bill Jensen), Graeme Dovaston had been struck by a car when he was a working officer, and his leg was broken in seven places. That was in 1973. Infection set in, and after a fifteen-year struggle, his leg had to be amputated. When Bill Jensen learned that a prosthetic leg had failed Dovaston and that his long-awaited trip to America had become a nightmare as he tried to maneuver on a wooden foot fastened with straps that etched wounds into his hips, Bill took action.

  Bill lobbied two Washington State firms to donate parts for a prosthetic leg that worked, and then organized a fund drive to raise the rest of the $19,000 needed for the remarkable artificial limb. After twenty years of pain and disappointment, Graeme Dovaston was able to lay down his crutches and walk once more, thanks to Bill Jensen.

  Bill, in his King County Police uniform, smiled broadly from the pages of his local paper as he held a picture that showed his Australian friend walking with ease. Once more, Jenny and Scott Jensen were very proud of their dad.

  Still, the Jensens’ children worried about the conflict in their home. They loved both their parents, and when Bill and Sue Jensen fell into arguments, Jenny and Scott tried to mediate, too young to understand their basic differences and the disappointments each of their parents felt in a marriage that sometimes seemed doomed to failure. Sue, the bubbly optimist, kept trying to bring Bill into a relationship in which they shared responsibility, while Bill, the sullen, self-focused pessimist, resisted—pulling further away. Sadly, it wasn’t a particularly unusual situation in many American marriages.

  Sue wasn’t afraid of Bill, not at all. She had long since pushed her dorm adviser’s warning back into her subconscious mind. She had almost forgotten her injuries at Bill’s hands when Scott was a newborn, as well as those that came later.

  She knew her children loved their father devotedly, and that Jenny and Scott wanted their parents’ marriage to succeed. Bill was still coaching Jenny’s teams, and he joined Scott in father/son Indian Guide activities. He and Scott still rode their motorcycles together, Bill on the big “hog” and Scott on one geared to his size.

  Every time Sue thought about leaving the man she’d been married to for eighteen years, she felt she couldn’t do it—it would break Jenny and Scott’s hearts. There had to be a way to get Bill to join her in serious counseling.

  Sue no longer had the self-confidence she once had as a young bride and in the early years of her marriage. Bill told her repeatedly that she was the reason they had problems. By now, Sue believed him. Her parents had been happily married, her sister was in a long-term positive relationship with a fine man, and most of her friends enjoyed solid marriages. Maybe Bill was right—maybe it was something she was doing wrong.

  Sue had always believed Bill and found him intelligent and a man who made sound financial decisions. She was no longer working at a job outside their home, happy to be able to stay home with her children, but in a way, that made her more vulnerable to Bill’s steady chipping away at her self-image. She often resented Bill, with his anger and his vacillating moods, but she still respected his opinions, although certainly not as she had done in their college days.

  Even though she had a degree in psychology, Sue wasn’t sure what factors were involved in the way Bill jumped from one obsession to another. For a while, he focused on showing champion-class dogs—Great Danes, to be exact. They had a Great Dane as a beloved pet, but when the dog developed problems with irritable bowel syndrome, Bill ordered that it be put down. Sue begged to have another dog, but Bill agreed only if she promised that he would decide when the next dog would either be given away or euthanized.

  Whatever irritated Bill had to go.

  No matter how mercurial he could be, few would quarrel with the notion that Bill Jensen was a whiz at finances. And making money was the most pervasive obsession he would embrace. He was one of the first to jump on the future prospects of computer stocks. He became a day trader long before most people had ever heard the term. He was out of bed every weekday at 6 A.M. and began to check the stock market, evaluating, buying, and selling until 1 P.M. Now he bought even more stocks on margin, but as long as the market stayed up, that wasn’t a problem.

  One day, when it dipped dramatically just before the millennium, Bill was caught short with margin calls, and he lost a lot of money. But for most of the nineties, he held 350,000 shares of prime computer stock.

  Bill Jensen continued to be a man who obsessed over one moneymaking scheme or avocation after another. In 1989, for example, during the Washington State Centennial, he found a way to make a lot of money very quickly. Through one of Sue’s former bosses, he snagged the franchise on official State Centennial gold-plated guns. He took time off from his sheriff’s duties to sell them at various venues—including the Washington State Fair. They sold for about $1,700, and $750 of that was pure profit.

  Next he set about building the best computer possible, and spent close to $100,000 on computer ware.

  He began to buy “collectible currency” on eBay and attempted to sell it at considerable profit. He attended conventions with others who were fascinated by coins and bills that were either history-laden or the result of mint mistakes that had slipped through before production stopped.

  One currency convention in Tennessee led to his next preoccupation: genealogy. Bill developed an intense interest in his famil
y’s genealogy, searching out the Pate family (that was his birth surname). He traced that name back to Tennessee and a man named John O. Pate, who was thought to be Bill’s great-grandfather. In the late 1890s, locals described John Pate as “mean looking, with a handle-bar mustache.” Although he had a wife, he was involved with a woman whose last name was Crowder. When his mistress was unfaithful to him, John O. Pate was enraged.

  The Crowder woman fled his wrath, only to meet up with Pate on the trail across Tennessee’s Big Bald Mountain. In what historians called “a brutal murder and mutilation,” Pate killed her. John O. Pate was about fifty at the time. He hid out in a cave on the northwest slope of Big Bald Mountain, and Margaret, his forgiving wife, brought him food. When lawmen caught up with him, he refused to come out until they threatened to toss dynamite into the cave. He was convicted on murder charges and served either nine or twenty years in a Tennessee prison, depending on which genealogy you read. Thereafter, he stayed clear of the law.

  Riley Pate, who may also have been related to Bill Jensen, was sentenced to death in 1896 for the shooting of a fifteen-year-old youth who had thrown a rock at him when he was drunk. Mat Hensley, the victim, died of wounds to the “lungs and liver.”

  Although Bill Jensen had never considered himself a Pate, he was intrigued by his possible connections to the Tennessee Pates.

  As Bill Jensen immersed himself in one near obsession after another, Bill and Sue grew further apart. She had come to a place where she simply quit trying to get him to do chores around their home and just did them herself. As far as their children knew, they were still a close family. Some days, Sue vowed to try harder; on others, she tried to cope with the desolate feeling that comes with an increasingly empty relationship. She concentrated on Jenny and Scott.

  Bill continued to coach Jenny’s teams. Sue worked hard to retain family traditions for her children’s sake.

  The Jensens hosted their traditional Halloween parties, where Bill invariably dressed up as a homicidal maniac, his skin and clothes stained with fake blood.

  And everyone laughed.

  Bill’s gun safe held at least seventeen weapons, a few of them the gold-plated Centennial guns, but most were firearms he’d bought or traded.

  If the delicate balance in the marriage could just stay suspended where it was, there was always the chance that the Jensens could stay together in some kind of détente.

  And then, on July 23, 1997, their lives changed dramatically and there was no going back. Ever.

  *Some names have been changed. The first time they appear, they are marked with an asterisk.

  Two

  Secrets and Lies

  It was full, hot summer in Washington State in July 1997, and Bill Jensen continued to work as a court security officer in Issaquah, in the shadows of Snoqualmie Pass. It seemed to be a much safer assignment than patrolling at night in a one-man sheriff’s patrol car.

  But it wasn’t.

  Court was under way when a fugitive from the law who was armed and intoxicated entered the Issaquah courthouse through an unauthorized entrance. Bill ordered him to stop, and at first, he did. He gave his name as William Martin. Bill led him back to the desk area where he was stationed.

  He ran Martin’s name through the WASIC police computers and found that there were warrants out for Martin’s arrest. Realizing that he’d been found out, Martin fled down two flights of stairs and was outside the courthouse and in his car when Bill caught up with him. Bill grabbed Martin through the window and held on tight, but the escapee managed to get his car started. He threw his vehicle into reverse, dragging Bill with him until Bill was forced to release his grip and fell heavily.

  “He put a big dent in my knee,” Bill said later. He recalled that he ached all over the following day, but expected he would heal within several days.

  But he didn’t. Unfortunately, Bill Jensen’s right knee had been seriously damaged, more than anyone realized at the time. His back was injured, and his right ring finger had also been damaged. In most professions, that injury wouldn’t have been particularly significant—unless it happened to a concert violinist or a police officer. Bill was right-handed, and he could no longer trust his aim when firing a gun.

  Several times when he was driving after the incident, he was unable to move his foot from the accelerator to the brake. Again, law enforcement officers need to be capable of pursuit driving at high speeds and to have lightning-quick responses. Bill had been expert at that, but he wasn’t any longer.

  Bill had two surgeries on his right knee, and his physician reportedly told him he was too young to have a third, for fear he might end up in a wheelchair at an early age. When he walked, Bill’s patella (kneecap) clicked. A complete knee replacement would last only ten to twelve years, and his doctor wasn’t sure another replacement when Bill was only fifty would be advisable.

  Bill Jensen could not help but remember how his Australian friend’s police career had ended, or how much pain he had suffered after his leg was broken—and then amputated. Now, something similar had happened to him.

  For all intents and purposes, Bill Jensen’s dream of becoming an FBI special agent was now impossible. He had always planned to be a cop; he’d made it, and just before the age of forty his career might be ending. He didn’t have enough years in to get his full retirement.

  It was at this point in Bill Jensen’s life that tremendous changes washed like acid over the Jensen family. Bill’s newest obsession was about his health, his disablement, and his pain. He thought of nothing else.

  In slow increments, Bill had changed so much that the man Sue had fallen in love with in 1975 was unrecognizable. The slender young man had long since vanished. Even before he was injured, Bill had put on more than a hundred pounds, much of it around his waist. His weight problems now became a vicious circle. Because it hurt to walk, he moved as little as possible, rarely exercising. He no longer coached Jenny’s basketball and baseball teams but sat, instead, in the stands. When he moved, it was with an exaggerated limp.

  And the less Bill Jensen exercised, the more weight he gained. He had reached 350 pounds, and was now headed toward four hundred. Sue had put on about twenty pounds, but she looked essentially as she had when they were first married. It wasn’t Bill’s appearance, though, that made her wonder where their marriage was going; it was his moodiness and his complete self-absorption, which put a pall over the whole family.

  Bill had always been a man who held grudges, keeping track of those who he felt had wronged him. Now, since he believed he was almost totally disabled by his knee injury, he made plans to sue his insurance company for $1.7 million. The King County Sheriff’s Office respected his almost twenty years as a deputy and offered him “light duty” at the sheriff’s office for a few days a week. It was essentially desk work; it wasn’t really being a cop—not to Bill Jensen.

  He retired from the King County Sheriff’s Office in September 1999.

  Bill grew more bitter as the months passed, and he blamed everyone around him for his personal knee-injury disaster. He spent most of his days and nights sitting in a recliner chair watching television, angry at the fugitive who had maimed him, angry at his wife, angry at his children, angry at his fellow cops, angry at the whole world.

  Impatient, he scoffed at exercises that might have helped in his physical rehabilitation. He wore a heavy brace on his knee and walked with an exaggerated limp. His doctor referred him to the University of Washington Pain Clinic, but he walked in one door and out the other, denying the possibility that he could get along without pain pills. “It’s just not going to work.”

  Sue sensed that things weren’t right. Bill was starting to take too many of the painkillers that had been prescribed for him, although, initially, he didn’t appear to be negatively affected. The pills weren’t helping. He still complained of pain continually.

  “It got to the point,” Sue recalled, “that if he didn’t take the pain pills, you’d wish he would have.”<
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  As Bill moved ahead with his suit against the insurance company, Sue agreed, at his insistence, to participate in a video presentation that allegedly showed how Bill and his family’s lives had changed since his injury. Images of Bill coaching Jenny’s sports teams and carrying his children on his back as he crawled on their carpet, and of him laughing with them, appeared on the screen.

  Scott and Jenny spoke to the camera, explaining how much fun their father had been, but was no longer. The video showed Jenny mowing the lawn, although Bill had only rarely mowed the lawn even when he was able-bodied. At Bill’s urging, Sue spoke of how his injuries had robbed her of his companionship as a loving husband. Bill’s physicians described how his accident had left him incapacitated.

  Much of what was said about Bill’s knee and back pain was an exaggeration. It was certainly true that he was in pain, and early on he had worked hard with a physical therapist to alleviate some of that pain, but he no longer believed it would help. He was eating far more calories than he needed, and piling on pounds that put more stress on his knee and back.

  Oddly, when Bill spoke to the camera about his childhood, he described it as if it had been right out of Leave It to Beaver. He characterized his early years as happy and normal, recalling that the Lone Ranger was one of his heroes. He told the camera that he’d liked cowboys and Indians and that he’d been an average kid, who grew up to be a loving husband and father and a brave police officer. He failed to mention his years in foster homes or the childhood abuse he had endured. He presented a life—but it wasn’t his life at all.

  When Sue looked at the final product to be used in Bill’s lawsuit against the insurance company, it was almost heartbreaking. She was viewing her marriage and her family through the looking glass—the way she always hoped it would be, and never was.