by Ann Rule
“No. I think Bill Jensen is an idiot.”
“For what?”
“He is an ex-officer. He disgusts me. That’s all I can say.”
Yancy Carrothers had been on the witness stand for almost a full court day. Even with his checkered background, he had been an excellent witness for the prosecution. Jim Conroy wanted his testimony disregarded, which was understandable, and he especially wanted Detective Cloyd Steiger to avoid validating Yancy in any way when he took the witness stand. Cheryl Snow agreed to the latter.
Iris Jensen testified next, and Marilyn Brenneman questioned her about her meetings with Yancy Carrothers and about her statements to Brenneman when she had gone to Iris’s home in Bremerton.
Iris had a very bad memory, or at least she seemed to recall only vague bits and pieces of what had happened.
Although she had been estranged from her brother in the past, she said they had been quite close over the last five years. She believed that she had given the man with the code word “Flying Kings” money for Bill’s bail. Her testimony had little impact one way or the other.
Cloyd Steiger followed. He gave a clear, step-by-step overview of the police and prosecuting attorney’s office probe into the murder plot that had been hatched by Bill Jensen. It had to be a swift strike, as they sent Detective Sharon Stevens into the jail twice. And on the second visit, she’d worn a wire and caught Jensen’s voice on tape as he outlined his instructions.
Steiger was an old master at testifying. He could not be shaken by any ploy the defense might attempt. And Conroy didn’t try for long to do that.
Sharon Stevens was a pretty black woman, but she wasn’t the prostitute that Yancy had said “Lisa” was. She had been a detective with the Seattle Police Department for seven years, and she currently was assigned to the Sexual Assault and Child Abuse Unit. She had agreed immediately to help Cloyd Steiger find out exactly what Bill Jensen had on his mind on July 23, 2003.
Stevens answered Cheryl Snow’s questions about her appearance when she walked over to the King County Jail the next day. She had given a false name even to the jail staff.
“What did you look like?” Snow asked.
“I was in a role. I actually had on blue jeans and a T-shirt. My hair was in individual braids—about midback length. I had removed all my jewelry. I had removed all my makeup—so I kind of looked plain.”
“Do you think it’s fair to say you’re someone who maybe looks younger with makeup off ?”
“Yes, I do.”
Stevens identified photographs of the jail’s visiting area, pointing out the booths with single stools and speaker phones with which to communicate with the prisoner on the other side of the glass.
She testified that Bill Jensen had seemed relieved when he saw her. “He seemed like he had been expecting me. He was very comfortable. He spoke with me freely—wasn’t hesitant to talk to me.”
She explained that she wasn’t familiar with this area of the jail and that the jail staff had no idea who she was. She’d been nervous when she held the note from Yancy Carrothers up to the glass so Jensen could read it. “I assumed that probably would have been against the rules.”
Sharon Stevens told the jury that she had been careful to have Bill Jensen repeat his list of instructions several times. She wanted to be positive she had heard him correctly, and have it firmly in her mind when she reported back to Cloyd Steiger.
“Can you describe Mr. Jensen’s mood or demeanor when he told you to tell him [Yancy] good luck?” Snow asked.
“I would characterize him as being very excited, more like giddy, in the way of having me there, knowing that his plans are still going through. He smiled at me while we were speaking…very, very comfortable with me. We were talking like old friends.”
When Sharon Stevens returned for her second visit with Jensen, she couldn’t go incognito. The DEA agents would have to be there to record this visit, and the corrections sergeant needed to know who Sharon was.
This time, Jensen wasn’t surprised to see her. She held up another note from Yancy, and he read it quickly before she shredded it, put it back in its envelope, and tucked it into the waistband of her jeans.
At this point, Cheryl Snow delivered the coup de grâce of the state’s case into evidence: each juror was given a transcript to follow as he or she listened to the defendant’s voice ordering the murder of four people.
The courtroom was hushed as Bill Jensen’s and Sharon Stevens’s voices came over the sound system. What was said had been shocking even to the detectives and prosecutors, who were all too familiar with the depths that some conscienceless minds will sink to; and now the words and thoughts that played out on this afternoon struck both the gallery and the jurors like blows to the heart.
One juror wiped the tears that coursed down her face, and a fellow juror handed her a tissue. The defense would later ask to have her dismissed. Judge Richard Jones didn’t acquiesce. Honest emotion is no reason to dismiss jurors. “The types of cases that we try in King County are difficult, trying cases,” Judge Jones said. “If we were to try every single case in a vacuum without any juror having any degree of sensitivity, it would be a far cry from reality. That’s not what we are experiencing today. The Court finds there is no basis to exclude the juror.”
How on earth could Bill Jensen explain away this gruesome evidence? And it was gruesome—not in the sense that bloody clothing might be, but because it was a husband and a father willing to sacrifice his own family in the hope of gaining a fortune.
James Conroy wanted to bring Jenny and Scott Jensen into the courtroom to show that his client had been a good father. Marilyn Brenneman argued vehemently against that, knowing it would be an excruciating ordeal for them.
The defense also asserted that Bill Jensen had no reputation for inflicting excessive force during his two decades as a deputy. Brenneman pointed out that there was a vast difference between what happened on the job and what happened in the home.
Marilyn Brenneman was a tough opponent, always maintaining grace under pressure, probably because she knew the law backward and forward and she had a keen sense of humor that defused courtroom battles. She saw no humor at all, however, in cases where women or children were victimized.
She needed now to show that Yancy Carrothers was not known in the King County Jail as a snitch. Corrections officers testified that Yancy didn’t wear a “snitch jacket.” There are many complicated layers determining jail reputations. Yancy enjoyed, indeed, his position as a “stand-up guy,” albeit sometimes given to fisticuffs when he came in intoxicated.
On June 2, 2004, over Marilyn Brenneman’s and Cheryl Snow’s fervent objections, James Conroy brought Jenny and Scott Jensen into the trial to testify. It was a fruitless and sad decision. Neither of them was on the stand for more than a few moments, and they had nothing to add that might help the defense. They identified the defendant as their father, their voices choked with tears.
Ten days after his trial began, Bill Jensen took the witness stand.
It was Wednesday morning, June 2. His attorney led him through a lengthy description of his years as a police officer, his service to the community, the years he coached softball and basketball, and moved on to his disabling injury, suffered when he chased a wanted man out of the courthouse in Issaquah.
He spoke with enthusiasm of his second career teaching computer science. Conroy interrupted him before he explained why he hadn’t stayed with that job, leaving the impression that it had been a successful venture.
He asked Jensen about the deposition where he had made the “slashing motion” across his neck.
“Mr. Jensen, what were you trying to do when you did that?”
“I was trying to push my wife’s buttons,” he answered easily.
“She described it as a very stupid thing to do. How would you describe it?”
“A stupid thing to do. It was. She was laughing at me, you know, and it was a very immature, childish thing to do.�
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Jim Conroy asked Bill Jensen about another alleged threat to Sue: “ ‘I’ll tell you the same thing I told my attorney—if I go to jail, you’ll go to your grave.’ Do you remember saying that?”
“I don’t remember saying that at all. Quite often, both of us would be talking at the same time…. I remember saying something about ‘You’re going to hell if you don’t behave.’ ”
Bill Jensen appeared puzzled, unable to recall that particular argument. “Could she have misunderstood me? Gosh, if I was going to kill somebody, I sure wouldn’t be telling my attorney first. It didn’t make any sense.”
And that “misunderstanding” was, Jensen said, what had caused him to end up in jail for “felony telephone harassment,” a “silly, Class C felony.”
The questioning moved swiftly to Bill Jensen’s first meeting with Yancy Carrothers. He insisted that he’d been warned from the beginning that Yancy was a snitch, and not to be trusted. He knew this, he said, before Yancy even came to the tank where he was being held.
Slowly, the defense strategy was emerging. Jensen said that no one on the tier was aware that he had been a police officer for twenty years. And that he had not approached Yancy; it was the other way around.
“The first time he came up to me was with his artwork. He really wanted me to look at his artwork that he does in his cell. He made a big deal out of that, you know, and then he was really paying me a lot of attention.”
“As time progressed, what did Mr. Carrothers do?”
“He offered to kill my wife for money.”
“Why did he do that?”
Cheryl Snow objected repeatedly to questions that required the defendant to speculate about Yancy Carrothers’s motivation, and Judge Jones sustained them.
Conroy moved on to suggest that Bill Jensen must have been angry and upset when he arrived on the tier.
“Oh, yes, I was. Definitely.”
“And Mr. Carrothers volunteered to help you?”
“Yes, he did.”
“How often would he come to you and volunteer to assist you with your problems?”
“Almost every day. And you know, it started with him apologizing to me about overhearing or eavesdropping on my conversations I had on the phone, which is within earshot of his cell.”
Led by his counsel’s questions, Bill Jensen testified that Yancy Carrothers had gone to great lengths to describe his abilities in certain areas, and repeated that he could “help him out.” He had asked questions about the defendant’s family.
“Did you believe that he was trying to kill your family?”
“Yes, I believe that was what he was going to do.”
Jensen’s position was that he was locked up in jail, hounded by a stranger who was determined to kill his family, a stranger who started out asking for $30,000 for each person.
“What was your intention at that juncture insofar as this particular conversation?”
“My intentions?” Jensen sounded confused. Often, it took him a beat to pick up the gist of his lawyer’s questions.
“Yes.”
“My intention was to put Carrothers away for the rest of his life.”
It seemed that the defense attorney was dragging information out of Bill Jensen. His answers were short and slow.
“Why is that?” Conroy asked.
“Because I could not even stand the man even suggesting what he was suggesting.”
Jensen said he knew of Carrothers’s reputation, had heard enough about his so-called abilities, and he was incensed.
“And then it became your intention to do what—a reverse sting?”
“Yeah.”
“What did you do in an effort to accomplish this particular task?”
“There came a specific day around July 1 when I realized…that this man was serious about wanting to kill my family. I then started taking notes about everything that he said, and everything that was done.”
“And what was your plan, then?”
“I wanted to build a good enough case against him so that I could go to the Seattle Police, report him, and also talk to the prosecutor about a trade on my current charges—if I brought him Mr. Carrothers.”
This was Bill Jensen’s defense.
He told the jurors how very difficult it had been for him to befriend someone like Yancy Carrothers. “It was extremely hard,” he sighed, “but I did it.”
Not only was Bill Jensen giving himself a unique defense—the reverse sting defense—but he was depicting himself as a hero, sickened by his daily contact with a man like Carrothers but soldiering on nevertheless.
“Toward that end,” Conroy asked, “did you then give him details about your wife and your kids and where they lived?”
“Yes, I did.”
While that bizarre answer sank into the minds of those observing, the defendant was excused and another witness took the stand. This man was also an alumnus of the eleventh floor ad seg tank. He swore that he had warned Bill Jensen that Yancy Carrothers was not to be trusted. That, of course, would bolster the defense position that Jensen had never intended to have his family destroyed. Far from it.
Marilyn Brenneman could not ask this prisoner about his past—the defense had won this one in a sidebar argument. Jensen’s supporter had a record of sex offenses against a minor, but the jurors never heard that.
The witness supported Jensen’s contention that he was doing his own undercover operation, fully aware that Yancy wore a snitch jacket.
But why had he taken such chances with the lives of the intended victims? Bill Jensen had given a man he believed to be a killer a virtual road map to his family.
Back on the stand, Jensen said he had taken voluminous notes on each day’s conversation with Yancy as part of his reverse sting operation. In fact, he said, those notes were right there in the courtroom, on the defense table. This came as a surprise to his defense attorney—and to Cheryl Snow and Marilyn Brenneman. The notes had not been provided in discovery. Apparently no one was aware of Jensen’s notes—except for Jensen himself.
The prosecutors were quite sure he had written these notes during his trial, after listening to testimony, so that he would have them to substantiate his claim that he’d been only a detective trying to trap a potential killer. They had watched him scribbling frantically at the defense table.
As Jim Conroy questioned him, Bill Jensen disclosed more of the minute details he had provided to Yancy Carrothers—right down to cell phone numbers. Anyone armed with that intelligence could have located the four intended victims easily.
Why had he been so specific, and why had he given a man he believed to be a killer the real information? Couldn’t he have given him fake addresses and vehicle descriptions? Conroy obviously saw a problem there, and questioned his client about it.
“Well,” Jensen responded to his attorney’s questions, “I was quite convinced that you could not arrest or charge somebody for [having] fictitious names and addresses. I started at one and kind of went up to three as I made the calculation, knowing I had to give this to him in case he…somehow verified it. Plus, I knew he wasn’t going to be able to do the hit without all the down payment.”
It was an almost confabulated answer.
Answering Conroy’s questions, Bill Jensen was saying exactly the same things that Yancy Carrothers had testified to—all the money discussed, all the possible MOs—only the defendant insisted this had all been part of his own efforts to get 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 min
er 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.
