by Ann Rule
She seemed to be impressed, and she wondered how he’d made that much money being a “computer geek.”
“I did okay,” he said succinctly.
Bill admitted that he was a little worried that his wife might have rewritten some documents that would make everything roll to his son.
“You want us to get him too?” she asked again.
“Well, it’s a possibility. Yeah.”
“Yancy doesn’t do minors.”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt him, but—”
But there it was. Bill Jensen didn’t want anyone between himself and what he estimated was Sue’s and Carol’s million-dollar fortune, and he realized now that his son would probably stand ahead of him in the money line.
Lisa assured him that Yancy would be “pissed” to hear that Scott was now part of the hit. He wouldn’t want to kill a boy.
Bill had come to a decision. It had to be all four of his relatives. There wasn’t anyone else who would prevail over him when the estates were probated. Even if Yancy didn’t like it, he instructed Lisa: “Well, my suggestion then…is, Clean house.”
Although he spoke cryptically, she knew what he meant.
Bill had promised Yancy $100,000 and he was now willing to add a $50,000 bonus if everything went right.
Lisa countered with $50,000 per person, $200,000 for all four.
Bill disagreed, saying that he had heard the going rate for hits was $20,000 to $30,000 per person.
She wondered how he knew that, but she told him he would have to work it out with Yancy. That wasn’t her department.
Bill was still worried that something might go wrong, and if it did, he told Lisa, she and Yancy and the other man had to promise to keep their mouths shut.
“I’m gone,” Lisa said. “You don’t know me. My real name ain’t on nothing I been using. Everybody’s on their own. That’s the kind of people we are.”
“Just make it look like an accident,” Bill Jensen said, “if you can.”
“All right. Got it.”
“Okay.”
And she had, indeed, “got it.” Lisa, AKA Seattle Police detective Sharon Stevens, walked back to the Homicide Unit with a crystal-clear recording of her conversation with Bill Jensen.
Jensen himself returned to his cell, pleased that he had managed to carry out such a clever plan to wreak vengeance on his estranged wife. Whether he truly believed that there was a huge fortune awaiting him when his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two children were dead, only he knew. He had whittled away at the bank accounts and stock portfolios he and Sue once had until they were much diminished. But he had bragged to “Lisa,” who was really an extremely effective detective, as well as a brilliant actress, that there was “big money” ahead. If, indeed, there was, one would suspect that Bill Jensen might do his best to avoid sharing much of it with Yancy Carrothers and his partners in crime.
It may have been that revenge was even more important to Jensen than an inheritance. He had seethed for weeks when he found himself in jail. He’d always considered himself far smarter than his wife. He’d controlled her, lied to her, even terrorized her, and yet she was free and he was locked up.
He smiled a grim little smile as he entered his cell, confident that he would be out soon. How could he be convicted of felony–domestic–violence if there were no witnesses against him?
And he was sure now that by his court date there would be no living witnesses left.
Yancy Carrothers wasn’t exactly the hero type, but he had his ethics and his point of no return. As he had spent more time listening to what Bill Jensen wanted him to do, he’d been more and more revolted. The guy was perfectly willing to kill his own family! Yancy’s “wife” had worked the streets, but he’d loved her, and he still grieved for her. She had been a murder victim. He figured if a man was lucky enough to have a wife and a couple of kids, he should be grateful. But Bill was eager to throw them away for money.
Yancy had helped police before—solved a few murders for them—and he was proud of that. He wasn’t a “snitch” who went running to tell on someone for every little picky thing they did—but it made him feel important and worthwhile to know he’d saved some lives. Now, Yancy had become the person who stood between two terrified women and two teenagers and someone bent on destroying them. That was a very large responsibility for someone who spent his life tiptoeing between being a prisoner and being a regular citizen, always living on the edges of society and looking for a quick buck and an easy way to get forbidden drugs.
He had thought about ripping the man named Bill off, and he’d taken the money from his sister down at the ferry dock. He’d been willing to take the pain pills, and prescriptions for more, that Bill had in his property box, too, but Bill had outfoxed him there.
But would Yancy Carrothers really kill four innocent people to make $150,000? No. Would he step forward to save four people he didn’t even know, even though it might cost him his own life?
That he wasn’t so sure about, but in the end, he found himself worrying about the intended victims, afraid that Bill would simply find somebody else to do it if he wasn’t stopped. Yancy realized he wasn’t a killer, or someone who could order a hit on innocent victims.
Bill Jensen wouldn’t find out all the details of how he’d been found out—not for months.
Still, wheels were turning. Bill had only a few days to congratulate himself on his clever plan before it ended in ashes.
Four
Closing In
Cloyd Steiger had been a Seattle Police officer for a quarter of a century, a detective for thirteen years, and in Homicide for a decade. He was a big, rumpled-looking man who didn’t look like a detective—and that afforded him an advantage as he investigated some of the more difficult cases that came across his desk. Steiger took pride in his work, and being a cop was important to him. He felt that a police officer owed it to the community to be honest and someone who could be trusted. Steiger had no patience at all for rogue cops who put a smudge on the whole profession’s reputation.
Homicide detectives have to be open to information from all manner of sources. They usually talk to those closest to murder victims first—families, friends, coworkers—and look next for witnesses who may have just happened on vital information. Sometimes those who investigate homicides get information from more exotic tipsters. Most prisoners in jails and penitentiaries aren’t violent. They might commit thefts and burglaries, sell illegal drugs, rob banks, or use fraudulent schemes to benefit themselves, but they look down on killers—particularly on those who hurt women and children. Child killers and rapists are at the bottom of the ladder in prison pecking order.
When someone who walks most of the time on the other side of the law contacts a Homicide detective with what may be vital information, the detective listens.
When Bill Jensen’s attorney once asked Cloyd Steiger why he always accepted collect phone calls from prisoners, he explained succinctly, “If you’re looking for information on crooks, you don’t go to Boy Scouts. You go to the crooks. If they’re willing to tell you something, you should listen. Whether it’s good or not and you use it is one thing—but if you don’t listen, you’ll never know.
“Usually,” Steiger continued to explain, “you’ll get a phone call from someone who has information about something you’re working on. I’d meet with them, see what they have to say, and see if it’s a known case, listen to see if things they are telling me are consistent with what I already know about the case—and go from there.”
Steiger also looked to see what the motivation behind the informant’s coming to him was. He tried to keep an open mind, and he accepted collect phone calls from jail. You never knew.
As it happened, Cloyd Steiger knew Yancy Carrothers; he had followed up on what Yancy had told him on two murder cases, and found that it was the truth. Yancy had helped bring about convictions in both instances. He had also helped prevent a jailbreak in which corrections officers could have
been injured.
Steiger had received a collect phone call from the King County Jail on the afternoon of July 23, listened to what Yancy Carrothers had to say, and within an hour walked over to the jail and arranged to bring Yancy back to an interview room in the Homicide Unit. Before he did that, Steiger checked to see if there was a prisoner named William Jensen on the eleventh floor of the jail.
There was.
On the way back to Homicide, the detective and the prisoner stopped at the property room and removed something from Yancy’s belongings—a piece of paper.
In the newly constructed Seattle Police Headquarters, every interview room was wired for sound and videotaping. Yancy neither asked for nor was offered any payment for what he was about to say. He knew he was on camera. He showed Cloyd Steiger the sheet of paper he’d kept in his property box. At first glance, it was only a list of names, physical descriptions, addresses, car makes, and license plates—but it made an unnerving kind of sense as Yancy explained what it was.
The three names were a hit list. And the victims-to-be could be found at those addresses or driving the cars listed on the page.
Steiger had begun a more thorough investigation into what almost surely was a murder-for-hire plot. There were only three names on the first list he saw: Sue Jensen, Carol Harris, and Jenny Jensen. That was why he had driven to Newport Hills and knocked on Sue’s door late on a Wednesday night.
She validated everything that Yancy Carrothers had told him about her husband’s vendetta against her. She just hadn’t known that he had already hired someone to kill her.
Cloyd Steiger wasted no time. Early Thursday morning, July 24, he conferred with Senior Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Marilyn Brenneman. She had been the lead prosecutor in at least two King County cases where greedy and controlling husbands had murdered their trusting wives, and she had been responsible for both of their killers going to prison for life. It had been too late for those hapless women, but it wasn’t too late for Sue Jensen. Marilyn Brenneman agreed with Steiger that they needed to move ahead rapidly to forestall any murder scenario that Bill Jensen might have put in motion when Yancy Carrothers hadn’t delivered as quickly as he wanted.
Cheryl Snow, the senior deputy prosecuting attorney who was the new head of the King County prosecutor’s Domestic Violence Unit, was also consulted. Her unit had been concerned about Bill Jensen for months and had been responsible for his arrest and his upcoming court hearings. They knew a lot more about Bill Jensen than Yancy Carrothers did. Yancy didn’t know that Bill was an ex-deputy—but Marilyn Brenneman and Cheryl Snow did.
And so, with Steiger, Marilyn Brenneman had agreed that they had to send someone into jail to talk to Jensen, someone who would pretend to be an emissary from Yancy Carrothers, so that he would believe his original plot was going forward.
They could not do anything to entrap Bill Jensen; he had to be the one who brought up his desire for three murders to go forward.
Sharon Stevens had listened to Cloyd Steiger’s request for her help, and she volunteered at once to become “Lisa”—a woman Yancy had described to Bill Jensen as someone he trusted.
Sharon met with Yancy, but only to learn just enough about him and what he had told Bill Jensen so she wouldn’t give herself away.
“I wanted her to go in there cold [about the murder plot],” Steiger said, “and see what she could get out of him, knowing just what she did.”
Yancy had written the letter of introduction, and Lisa had been instructed to tear it up after Bill Jensen read it through the glass, and seal the fragments back up in the envelope.
Sharon went into the jail alone, made that first contact, and came back to the Homicide Unit, where she immediately typed out a report of what had transpired. After another meeting with Marilyn Brenneman, the investigators decided to move their probe up a notch. They had requested and received authorization for Lisa/Sharon to wear a wire when she visited Bill Jensen a second time.
It had been a technical challenge for Cloyd Steiger and Marilyn Brenneman because it was difficult to tape on both sides of the glass partitions in the visiting area. They got help with that from Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents, who arranged to be in the control room near the jail elevators, where they could view the visiting area.
DEA agent Terry Damon handed the tape of Sharon Stevens’s entire conversation, with Bill Jensen captured on it, to Cloyd Steiger. While he played it back, he simultaneously made a copy of it, and then put the original in an evidence envelope marked with “Case No. 03-340145,” his name, William Jensen’s name, and “Digital micro-cassette, recorded during undercover operation.”
One day, a jury would listen to it—all the instructions for murder, including Jensen’s conscienceless phrase “Well, my suggestion…then is, Clean house.”
“Clean house” meant the murders of Sue, Carol, Jenny…and even Scott. Would Jensen’s children ever recover from the awful knowledge that their own father wanted them dead?
Cloyd Steiger went to the eleventh floor of the King County Jail on July 29 and placed William Jensen under arrest for four counts of solicitation to commit murder.
During the trial to come, responding to the defense attorney’s questions about his scornful attitude during the arrest, Steiger refused to apologize for his inability to hide his disgust for a man who had once been a fellow officer of the law.
“I told him he was in an unusual predicament,” Steiger acknowledged. “In fact, I said, ‘Let me think of a word to describe it. Oh, yeah—you’re fucked.’ It angered me that he was a former police officer—because that’s what everyone hears on the news. ‘Former police officer tries to kill family.’ I was insulted as a police officer.”
Bill Jensen, who had considered himself a master at manipulating others to get what he wanted, was stunned to find that “Lisa” wasn’t who he had believed her to be.
And he was even more astounded to learn that Yancy Carrothers, a man Jensen believed was no match for his superior intelligence, had broken his promise to keep a deadly secret.
On July 29, 2003, King County prosecutor Norm Maleng charged William Jensen with four counts of attempted murder for hire in the conspiracy to kill Sue, her sister, Carol, Jenny, and Scott.
That news was the lead story on all of Seattle’s evening television broadcasts.
At last.
What had been roiling below the surface, the concentrated efforts to destroy Sue Jensen and everyone she loved, was finally exposed to the light of day.
It was a painful night for the Jensens and Carol Harris. They clung together, bolstering one another and joined by friends who loved them. It was very, very difficult to see their story play across television screens. Tabloid shows and newspapers were calling for interviews.
Dirty cops are fodder for the media. Maybe Bill Jensen had forgotten what he had written about in his “A” term paper at Washington State University a quarter century earlier, “Socio-Psychological Profile of Becoming a Corrupt Police Officer.”
It would be a long time before Bill Jensen went to trial. Prosecutors Cheryl Snow and Marilyn Brenneman would be the ones to face him in court. The fact that they were female—highly intelligent and attractive women—probably wouldn’t please him; he had habitually ranked women lower in his estimation than men. Given his resentment of his own mother, that probably was predictable.
In the fall of 2003, Marilyn Brenneman suggested the possibility of a plea agreement, not for Bill Jensen’s sake but for Sue and their children. A plea would mean no trial, and there would be no appeals or uncertainty. The Department of Corrections could transfer him out of state to a prison where he would have no contact with people with ties to Washington, and it would reduce media coverage of a trial in the Seattle area.
Even though a plea bargain would mean a shorter sentence for Bill Jensen, it was unlikely he would ever walk free. The possibility that he would live a long time in prison was slim. Marilyn Brenneman checked to see if he really
did have chronic lymphocytic leukemia as he had claimed. When it came to his health, Jensen was like the boy who cried wolf. But in this instance he had been telling the truth.
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) is a cancer of the white blood cells and bone marrow, characterized by uncontrolled growth of the blood cells. Many cases of CLL are detected in routine blood tests of people with no symptoms. CLL doesn’t progress as rapidly as acute leukemia, but it was one more addition to the many physical disabilities Jensen already had.
Sue Jensen saw the positive side of a plea agreement, agreeing that Bill would probably receive a long enough sentence that they wouldn’t have to be afraid of him any longer.
But Bill Jensen wanted to go to trial, believing, apparently, that he would surely prevail and convince a jury of his innocence.
With delays, it was late May 2004 before his trial began. Ironically, he and Sue were still married; her divorce action was stalled in the morass of legal filings.
Five
Trial
Superior Court judge Richard Jones would oversee the Jensen trial. It was Judge Jones who had sentenced Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, to an almost endless series of life sentences for the murders of more than four dozen young women. Jones, the brother of famed musician Quincy Jones, was thoughtful and meticulous in his rulings. That was fortunate, because his wisdom would make any appeals difficult.
James Conroy represented the defense. More often than not, Bill Jensen would appear in the courtroom in a wheelchair.
They began on May 24, 2004. Conroy started his objections early; he was concerned about the whereabouts of Yancy Carrothers, who had not been located. He didn’t want Cheryl Snow’s opening statements to mention Yancy; in fact, since the material witness seemed to be unavailable, Conroy asked that the case against his client be dismissed in the eventuality that Yancy never appeared.