Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases

by Ann Rule

The general feeling was that Bill Jensen had gone underground in Las Vegas, hiding there to avoid arrest. It had been his habit to run to Nevada whenever he felt he was going to be in trouble with court orders.

  But he could not hide forever. When he came back to the Bellevue area, Bill Jensen was arrested and booked into the King County Jail. It was May 29, 2003. As an ex-cop, he was housed in a maximum security section of the jail—administrative segregation—or as prisoners called it, “the Hole.” It was a pod of cells earmarked for those who needed to be in protective custody or who might be a danger to others. In one of the C tanks on the eleventh floor, each man was housed in a single cell, and was allowed out into the dayroom area—alone—for only an hour a day.

  This time, Bill Jensen didn’t bail out; he had used up his own money, and his father, who was now in his eighties, no longer wanted to risk losing his home. Bill’s latest attorney told him he would probably be in jail until the end of July, when his case would come to court.

  At first, those who feared what Bill might do next heaved a sigh of relief. Sue didn’t have to worry about something awful happening at Jenny’s graduation ceremonies; her father wouldn’t be able to attend. Their family and friends had a happy celebration, cheering as Jenny received her diploma.

  It was only a short respite, but even that was welcome. And yet, with this slight cessation of anxiety, Sue began to question herself, wondering if she had tried hard enough to preserve her marriage. Was there something more she could have done to make it possible for Jenny and Scott to have a father? When she read the Bible, the words seemed to say that divorce was wrong. She had always been a woman who tried to do the right thing, and, although she never wanted to live with Bill Jensen again, she felt a little sorry for him, locked up in jail.

  She was on the teeter-totter of emotions that so many battered women experience. Her attorney and her closest friends rushed to validate her bravery in following through with Bill’s arrest. They would not allow her to slip back into the way she had always rationalized the bad times in her marriage—by shoving abuse, intimidation, and blame far back into her unconscious mind.

  Women who have never been the object of domestic violence roll their eyes when they hear that Sue had even a moment’s doubt, but women who have been there understand her ambivalence.

  She turned to Diane Wetendorf’s site for help in dealing with this next escalation of her long, long divorce action. Bill would be out of jail soon enough, and she read that she had to be ready—to hide, to run, to testify against him, if necessary. Told that Scott and Jenny would probably have to be interviewed—and perhaps even testify—her heart sank. Sue had hoped they wouldn’t be drawn into this tangle any more than they had been.

  Sue’s fear came back, blooming stronger than ever. She had a safety plan, but when she studied domestic violence cases, particularly cases involving police officers, she realized it was very rare for those convicted to receive more than token sentences.

  “I am afraid,” she said, “that without further assistance, short of having to disappear, I will most likely be targeted by my husband as soon as he is released. I know Bill well enough to know…that he would eventually find me.”

  The other prisoners in Bill Jensen’s jail tank didn’t know who he was, and he certainly didn’t tell them he had been a cop for twenty years. Those in neighboring cells were mostly gang members, white supremacists, career criminals, and angry men who were known to start fights in jail. Bill could be very likable when he tried, and he got along with the men in other cells.

  All jail inmates complain about something—their “old ladies,” the food, cops, their attorneys. Bill waited until he understood the dynamics in his pod of cells, and then he confided that he’d been “screwed over” by a woman in his life.

  It wasn’t as if the pod inhabitants were all sitting around the tables in the dayroom; only one of them could be out at a time. But their cells were close enough together that they could carry on conversations, and the man who was out of his cell for his hour could stop by and visit all the other prisoners. They could trade candy bars, envelopes, items needed in their segregated world.

  Part of the mystique of being in jail or prison is the challenge to put something over on corrections officers. Notes are smuggled, or whispers are passed from one cell to another until messages get to the intended recipient. Most of the men in Bill Jensen’s pod were repeat offenders, and adept at evaluating new guys. They listened now to Jensen and saw that he was highly disturbed about situations he couldn’t attend to while he was locked up.

  The rumor in the tank was that Jensen had money—possibly big money—but he was playing things close to his vest.

  Yancy Carrothers* was a “frequent flyer” in the King County Jail. Indeed, he felt as much at home in jail as he did anywhere else, and didn’t really mind being arrested again and again. Yancy was proud to be known as a kind of career criminal, and often bragged that he’d been trained by his father to be an above-average practitioner of crime from the time he was a child. He took pride in the fact that he knew most of the guards in the jail as well as the inmate “regulars.” Yancy knew which prisoners were important in their gangs, who was planning an escape, and what the messages circulating in the tank were about. He knew how to send “kites” (notes) to jail management in a discreet manner.

  Yancy had a long, long rap sheet. He had numerous convictions for VUCSA (violation of uniformed controlled substance abuse—drugs), drunkenness, and assault. He liked to hint that he had been involved in far more violent felonies, although he stopped short of spelling out the details.

  Yancy Carrothers was nearing middle age, and his craggy face was marked by the indulgences he’d chosen. He looked somewhat older than he really was. He was as rail-thin as Bill Jensen was overweight, about five feet ten, with dark, longish hair. A man full of nervous mannerisms, he was smart and streetwise, and he let it be known to his fellow prisoners that he would do almost anything for money—or for drugs.

  Whenever Yancy Carrothers went to jail, he invariably ended up in the protective custody tank; he had a reputation for starting fights in jail, and the jail supervisors didn’t bother putting him in with the general population, knowing that, inevitably, there would be a fight with Yancy in the middle of it.

  He himself wasn’t sure why he tended to hit other prisoners in jail, but there was something about the county jail that made him want to fight. He may have known the reason very well: whenever he came into jail it was fresh off an arrest for being drunk or high on drugs, and in that state he was quite combative. He claimed to be a “pussycat” by the time he got to prison after weeks or months in jail. He hadn’t had a drink or drugs for some time, so he wasn’t inclined to fight.

  Despite his awesome number of arrests and his tendency to act first and think later, Yancy had a sentimental side. He had lost the woman he loved, and even though they’d never married, he considered himself a widower.

  On June 17, 2003, Yancy Carrothers found himself in the same protective custody tank as Bill Jensen: North 11, Lower B Housing Unit. There weren’t many white prisoners there at the time, and he felt that drew them together initially.

  Among his other talents, Yancy was an artist. He drew portraits and animals, and he was pretty good. Occasionally he decorated envelopes for other prisoners in exchange for favors, and sometimes he just passed the time in his cell by sketching.

  Yancy was aware of the big man named Bill who waddled painfully around the dayroom, but he waited—as always—for the stranger to approach him. Bill was out in the day area for his hour of comparative freedom when he stopped outside Yancy’s cell and began a conversation. They touched lightly on a number of subjects, feeling each other out.

  Yancy considered himself something of an expert on the law, and they spoke a little about the justice system. He didn’t know what Bill was in jail for, but the massive guy seemed to have some knowledge of different statutes, and he also talked as if he was pre
tty smart. Yancy could identify with that; he’d always known he was very intelligent, too, and capable of thinking way ahead of most people he dealt with.

  Neither man gave away much information, waiting for the other to go beyond idle chatting. They danced around like two boxers waiting to get in the first jab. Yancy was savvy about evaluating people, and he was in his element. He knew all the ropes.

  Bill had to be in “ad seg” for some reason, although Yancy wasn’t sure what it was. He didn’t look gay, one of the reasons prisoners ended up in this tank. Yancy had never run into Bill before, so he figured that the guy might be a protected witness from out of state, wanted by the Feds, or some kind of known troublemaker. That didn’t seem likely; he was too fat to be any threat in a fight. Maybe that was why he was in protective custody; in the general population, any guy who weighed at least four hundred pounds would be a target of harassment and teasing by other prisoners.

  The two prisoners got in the habit of stopping by each other’s cells when their free hour came around. Bill told Yancy that he’d heard he was a “stand-up guy.”

  “Who told you that?” Yancy asked.

  Bill jerked his head toward a cell where a prisoner dressed in the white uniform of an “ultra security” inmate—a gang leader—was housed.

  Yancy nodded as Bill went back to his own cell.

  There weren’t that many secrets in their tank because the men there could hear one another’s conversations, even though they couldn’t always see who was talking. Yancy had heard Bill complaining about how much stress he was under, and all the problems he had. At first, he complained about his financial troubles, but then he said his wife was the one who had caused them. He wasn’t that different from anyone else in the King County Jail; a lot of prisoners had worries about the women in their lives, and the majority of them blamed their incarceration on someone else. And for the moment, none of them could exert much control over anyone else, although the gang leaders had a certain cachet, even locked up in jail.

  At the time Yancy Carrothers and Bill Jensen were locked up in the tank on the eleventh floor, there were, as Yancy referred to them, “a couple of other gentlemen—M.O.G. Gangsters: Crips, Bloods, B.G.’s.”

  One of them was awaiting trial for the cold-blooded murder of a young police officer in a small King County town. When he was asked for his ID, the gang member had pulled out a gun instead. Fortunately for Bill Jensen, none of the gang members had the slightest idea he’d been a cop for twenty years.

  Yancy himself told Bill that he had once been in the upper echelon of a lesser-known gang: the Kings.

  “They all know me—all the guys in here,” Yancy bragged to Bill as he polished his own image the next time they talked. “They’ll vouch for me. Maybe I can help you with your problems if you told me what they are?”

  Bill studied him for a moment or so, evaluating what he said.

  “Well…let me think about it.”

  “If you need any more recommendations, you can ask more of the guys here.”

  Yancy sauntered off to take his shower. He wasn’t averse to doing almost anything if the price was right. He’d be out on the street soon, in contact with his backup people, able to help the fat guy with whatever was bothering him. He didn’t know if the guy really had any money. He didn’t look like he did, but you never could tell—even though he was pissing and moaning about having money troubles. The guy didn’t have any visitors, and didn’t seem to be getting mail either.

  Yancy was prepared to wait, and let the guy dangle. Experience had taught him not to be too eager to make a deal.

  Sue Jensen and her sister, Carol Harris, were going to have to face Bill in court; every defendant has the right to face his accuser. The date of the first hearing after Bill’s arrest was set: July 28, 2003. They both dreaded it, and more than that, they hoped devoutly that neither Jenny nor Scott would have to appear.

  Bill was in jail, and it didn’t appear that he would be bailing out before their court date. That gave Sue a little sense of security, but she still jumped at sounds in the night, and often stared into her rearview mirror to watch cars that had taken what seemed like too many of the same turns that she had. She had a burglar alarm, a gun, and her dog. She tried not to hover over her children and let them have as near a normal life as she could. They were very angry with her for sending their father to jail.

  She understood that.

  The fourth of July came and went, and Yancy Carrothers and Bill Jensen spent quite a bit of time talking to each other for the two hours each day one or the other was out of his cell. They appeared to be becoming good friends, although friendships forged in jail are by their very nature not destined to last. The choice of companionship is limited behind bars, and most prisoners go their own way when they get out.

  Bill even purchased one of Yancy’s artistic efforts to write to his children, an envelope with a beautiful long-stemmed red rose on the front.

  Yancy was released on July 10, and he had prospects he didn’t have before he met Bill Jensen. He was armed with a phone number that belonged to a woman who lived near Bremerton, Washington. Bill had given it to him; it belonged to Bill’s older sister Iris.

  Within an hour of his walking out of the King County Jail, Yancy Carrothers called Iris. She was expecting his call, but she waited until he gave her an agreed-upon password: “Flying Kings.”

  He and Bill came up with that, honoring the gang that Yancy had once belonged to.

  “Oh, yes,” she responded, “Bill told me you would be calling. I was wondering why you didn’t call me last night.”

  “I didn’t get a midnight release, like I thought I was going to. I just got out.”

  Iris Pate and Yancy Carrothers discussed when and where they would meet. She understood she was to give him some money—$2,500. Bill had told her that it was for his bail, and since she now held her brother’s power of attorney, she was in a position to give the cash to the friend he had specified.

  They decided that Iris would come across Puget Sound from Kitsap County on the ferry, an hour’s ride, and Yancy would meet her at the ferry dock. He told her what he looked like, and she described herself.

  Once Yancy had the money, he knew what he was supposed to do next. It had to be accomplished in less than two weeks. Bill had stressed that the timing was vital. He wanted his problems solved before July 28. And if things worked out as he had choreographed his plan, there would be more money for Yancy—a lot more money.

  Yancy met Bill’s sister at the ferry, counted the bills she gave him, bought her a Starbucks latte, and waved at her as she reboarded the ferry for its return run to Bre merton, completely unaware of what the cash was for.

  On July 23, Sue and Scott Jensen were home alone shortly after 9 P.M. Summer evenings in Seattle yawn on endlessly, but it was almost fully dark now.

  She jumped when the phone rang. The male voice on the other end of the line said he was a Seattle Police detective. He told her that it was a matter of urgency for him to talk with her, and asked directions to her house. Without thinking, she gave him the address and driving directions.

  As soon as she hung up, Sue berated herself for being so gullible. How did she know it was really a detective who had called? It could be a setup, and she realized she had practically rolled out the red carpet for a stranger.

  When she heard someone knocking on her door, she sent Scott out to the back door with a cell phone, telling him that if she shouted “Go!” he was to dial 911 and then run to their neighbors.

  This was the way they lived now.

  Sue peered nervously through her drapes; she could see an unmarked car in front of her house, and a big man dressed in street clothes standing outside her door. He identified himself, but she didn’t trust him.

  “Hold up your identification,” she instructed. “I need to be sure who you are.”

  He held up his badge and his police identification, and she opened the door and let him in. She had never s
een him before.

  He explained that he was a Homicide detective, not from King County, but from the Seattle Police Department. Half expecting him to slap handcuffs on her for some further complaint of Bill’s, she invited him to sit down.

  “Mrs. Jensen,” he began, “my name is Cloyd Steiger. I wanted to talk to you in person, and as soon as I could.”

  She waited, her heart thumping. Either Bill was dead or maybe something a lot worse had happened.

  Steiger seemed to be a kind man as he questioned her about her marriage and her upcoming divorce. He told Sue he needed to validate information he’d received a few hours earlier. The source of this intelligence was a little suspect, but it had had the ring of truth to it.

  Sue gave the detective a rundown of the chaos in her life over the past few years, and he nodded. He had heard enough to go ahead with what he needed to tell her.

  “I want you to pack and get out of here as soon as you can. We think someone is going to try to kill you.”

  Strangely, or perhaps not so strangely, she wasn’t even shocked. She had known that she was a target for almost two years, and it was almost a relief to have it finally happen.

  “It was Bill, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “We think so.”

  “I know he wants to kill me,” Sue said slowly. “I knew he would do it. I even went to the King County Journal editor back in February and told him that if I ended up dead, Bill would be behind it.”

  Cloyd Steiger told Sue that the Seattle Homicide Unit had reason to believe that a plot was in place to accomplish her murder. But it wasn’t just her death a contract called for.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your sister is on the list, too,” Steiger said quietly, waiting for that news to sink in before he went on.

  “My sister?”

  “Your sister…and your daughter, Jenny—”

  “Not my daughter!”

  Sue had been afraid that Bill might hurt her dog, and even that he might do something to her sister because he knew how much Carol meant to her.