by Ann Rule
“Never. I love my kids. I still kind of love my wife. She’s the mother of my kids. There’s no way that I was ever going to let anybody hurt them. But, boy, from where I was at, I wanted to put him away—”
“Mr. Carrothers?”
“Yeah. Mr. Carrothers. I wanted to put Mr. Carrothers away for life.”
“No further questions.”
Cheryl Snow rose to cross-examine Bill Jensen. “You stated that you didn’t feel Detective Steiger was going to listen to anything you told him about all of this undercover work that you had been doing for the last month? Is that correct?”
“I did not feel that Detective Steiger would have listened to me at all,” the defendant said stiffly.
“You had been waiting, you say—you tell us today while you’re under oath to tell the truth, tell us that for two months you conducted what you call a ‘reverse sting’ operation? Correct?”
“Yeah, that’s what I like to call it. He’s trying to get me to pony up some money for a crime that I really don’t think he’s going to commit. So I reverse it.”
Snow’s tone was full of doubt. “You state that you just kept waiting because you kept thinking, ‘I hope I get enough information so I can eventually go to the Seattle Police Department.’ Correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Yet when you meet Detective Steiger face-to-face…You meet two detectives on July 28 and there’s your big moment to turn over all your information about this undercover operation you’ve been running, and you tell them nothing?”
“That’s correct.”
“Not a thing?”
“That’s correct.”
“And it wasn’t until today that, for the first time, you pulled those notes out of Lord knows where—and offered them to this Court? Is that correct?”
Trickles of sweat had begun to drip down Bill Jensen’s face, but his voice remained steady. “That’s totally correct.”
He admitted that he had told his attorney that he had written down some things, but he hadn’t asked anyone to bring it to the attention of the police or prosecutor’s office. He wasn’t yet ready to spring his trap.
Cheryl Snow moved a little closer. “You didn’t write those notes until you sat in court here. Isn’t that true?”
“What was your question again?”
“You sat in court and reconstructed those notes, didn’t you, Mr. Jensen?”
“What was that?” He seemed to have been suddenly struck deaf.
She repeated the question.
“No, I did not.”
“You looked the jury in the eye and talked about how much you loved your family, and you provided someone that you thought wanted to kill them with all of the information necessary to do so?”
“I did not really believe he was ever going to kill my family. I wasn’t going to give him enough money to do so. It was difficult to determine his intent, but she [Lisa/ Sharon] sure made it clear that he certainly wanted the down payment to go through with it—”
“And you gave him all this personal information about this family that you tell us today you loved so much?”
“I just said yes,” the defendant said petulantly.
“You used your family as the bait to set these people up?”
“Now, I didn’t have any choice because that’s what he already knew I was in jail for. So I couldn’t have used…nobody else could I have used.”
Bill Jensen must have known that he had lost—that his ridiculous defense wasn’t convincing anyone. But he stubbornly answered the questions Cheryl Snow posed, each one more devastating to his case. He was angry, but he continued to come up with excuses.
Now he offered another reason for dragging his finger across his throat in what might have appeared to have been a threat to his estranged wife. It hadn’t been a death threat at all; he was only harking back to the days when he and Sue were scuba divers.
“It meant, I’m out of here—I’m out of air,” he offered lamely.
Finally, Bill Jensen was out of air.
On Friday, June 4, 2004, after hearing closing arguments, the jury retired to deliberate about the fate of William Jensen. They returned in less than four hours.
The verdict was guilty of four counts of solicitation of first-degree murder.
Six months later, December 10, 2004, while Christmas decorations adorned the King County Courthouse, the principals gathered once more in Superior Court judge Richard Jones’s courtroom.
Jennifer Jensen, now a beautiful young woman, asked to address the Court before Judge Jones pronounced the sentence. She read what she had written, and if the circumstances were any different, her father might have been proud of her brilliance.
“To this day, I simply cannot fathom what has happened to my precious family, that this man sitting before us conspired a plan to murder his wife, her sister, his own children. The depths of evil have taken over my father’s mind and soul in such a way that I deemed utterly impossible.
“Not only will I forever live in fear and anxiety, but I will continue to fear for the life of my best friend and companion: my mother. She’s the most valuable person in the world to me, and the thought of having her taken from me brings a prolonged heartache to my soul.”
Jenny’s voice broke, and Judge Jones told her to take her time, she was doing just fine.
“I simply cannot let myself imagine this horror. This fear will remain a constant for my entire family until my father is securely locked in a prison cell as far away from us as possible.
“What he’s done to me cannot be expressed in words, for there are no words that can explain the pain, trauma, and humiliation I have gone through. And to even think of what could have happened. I simply cannot go there.
“The fact that such brutal and cruel thoughts flowed through my father’s mind and were actually intended to be carried out proves that this man deserves the maximum punishment to the furthest extent of the law.
“My father once wore a badge of justice as an officer of the law. His punishment should serve in example for our society. He’s a disgrace not only to me as his daughter or to my family, but to the King County Police force and to the truly honorable policemen and -women in our country.”
Jenny wrote of her almost palpable fear of being murdered. “Whenever I walk from my car in the driveway—just to my front door—I scan the street and sometimes run, imagining the hit man popping up and shooting me. I’m also scared in my own house late at night, picturing someone behind a corner, waiting.”
She asked the Court for a maximum sentence, and then turned toward her father. “You should be so incredibly ashamed of yourself.”
Jenny spoke for several more minutes. Any normal man—father—would have been ashamed.
William Jensen didn’t seem to be; he was going over his remarks in his head, and gathering a stack of documents he wanted to hand to the Court. He had a different tack to take with Judge Jones, and he was anxious to present it.
Sue Jensen could not bring herself to speak, but she handed what she had written to the judge. So did Carol Harris.
The man about to be sentenced had yet another attorney representing him. That lawyer presented a statement, using what ammunition he had—which wasn’t much.
Cheryl Snow asked the Court to impose a sentence within the standard range for four such heinous crimes. She saw no mitigating factors at all.
Bill Jensen’s moment had come. Leaning heavily on a cane, he assured Judge Jones that he would look directly into his eyes, and he would tell him the truth “before you sentence me to some place in hell.”
He had come up with a new argument. “There are two Bill Jensens,” he began.
In essence, Jensen said he blamed jailers and the jail medical staff for giving him the wrong pain medications, which had changed his thinking, blurred his perception. That wasn’t his fault, of course. He went over the same story he had told during his trial, but blamed his response to Yancy Carrothers’s trick
ery on his having ingested the wrong meds. His mind had been skewed by OxyContin, ibuprofen, and other drugs—all in the wrong dosage.
Everything that had happened was someone else’s fault, and Bill Jensen was an innocent victim, catapulted from that “silly Class C felony” to where he was currently.
What had happened was all a mistake, misunderstandings, people plotting against him. The real Bill Jensen wouldn’t hurt anyone.
“I want my family to totally understand that from Day One, they have been safe. Whether they believe it or not. I pray that the Lord will bring them there. But they are not in any danger from me, and never have been.”
He offered the stack of papers to Judge Jones, who thanked him politely and said he would read them over the morning break.
When Judge Richard Jones returned, he commented that most of the documents Jensen had given him were grievances against the King County Jail or law enforcement officers or Jensen’s attorneys. They were not to be considered in this venue. And almost all of the rest of the paperwork had already been before the Court, and a matter of court record already filed.
“These motions are dismissed and denied.”
In the judge’s view, the cases Jensen had cited after reading some law books were of “meager assistance” to his arguments.
Richard Jones is a soft-spoken judge, and during trials, participants only rarely have a sense of what he is thinking. He prefers it that way, determined to be as fair as possible to both sides. But now he prepared to sentence William Jensen.
And now, at last, his opinions came out for those in the courtroom to hear.
“Mr. Jensen,” he began, “we find ourselves conducting this sentencing right in the middle of a season that should be geared around peace, hope, and sharing. We are right in the middle of a season when families are crossing miles across the planet to spend a few hours with family.
“Right now, as we speak, there are young men and women fighting for our country on the other side of the planet—and dying—with their last wish being the chance to spend a few precious moments with family.
“Mr. Jensen, there are those who will come into existence and spend their entire life chasing a dream of having a family. Mr. Jensen, you had a family. Regardless of the issues you had with your wife, you obviously had children who dearly loved you and cherished you.
“But, when given the choice, when given the choice of what was more important, instead of showing your children love and affection, you were giving physical descriptions to a hit man. And when asked about the involvement of your son as being a casualty of what was going to take place, your callous response was, ‘Oh, well…’
“Your greed and hatred and fear of losing things and wealth to your wife are the real factors that clouded your judgment to the point of having four people executed in order to accomplish your goals.
“Greed has been defined as an excessive desire to acquire or possess more than one needs or deserves, especially with respect to material wealth. Mr. Jensen, when you boil it down to the pure essence of what you did, you placed money over family, you placed hatred over compassion, and malice over common sense. That is a dangerous and deadly combination, and that was your downfall.
“Mr. Jensen, you told me there were two Bill Jensens. But the reality is there really is just one Bill Jensen. And that one Bill Jensen and the actions of that Bill Jensen will cause you to spend the rest of your life in prison, and your family spending the balance of their lives wondering what they had done to deserve you in their life, a husband and father who had no concept of the value of family.”
And with that, Judge Jones sentenced Bill Jensen to 180 months on Count I, which would run consecutive to 180 months on Count II, which would run consecutive to 180 months on Count III, which would run consecutive to 180 months on Count IV.
Sixty years in prison. Bill Jensen would be credited with 501 days for time served.
He would have no contact with the four potential victims he had sought to have killed.
Christmas was two weeks away, but the family who had once loved Bill Jensen would celebrate without him. Forever.
Sue Jensen was finally awarded a divorce in 2005, and she now uses her maiden name. She works to advise and support other women who are caught in terrifying domestic violence situations, particularly the wives or girlfriends of law enforcement officers or firefighters. She has been there, and she understands.
Scott and Jenny Jensen have blossomed and lead successful lives. Each has surpassed everything their mother had hoped for them.
There are still nightmares for Sue, Jenny, and Scott, bad dreams that creep up without warning. The shadows are still there, and it may take a lifetime for them to realize that they deserve to walk free and in the sunshine. Anyone who has lived under siege understands how difficult it is to trust again.
Sue Harris is grateful to an unlikely ally: Yancy Carrothers.
“I don’t care what he may have done in the past, or what kind of life he leads,” she told a friend. “He saved my life. He saved all of our lives. If he hadn’t come forward and told the police what Bill was planning, I wouldn’t be here talking to you now. So I thank Mr. Carrothers, and I always will.”
Bill Jensen is currently incarcerated in an isolation unit at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, Washington. As a former cop and a would-be family killer, his life would be in danger in the prison’s general population. He has filed an appeal and he visits the prison library to study law books there every Thursday.
Whether Bill Jensen listened to Judge Richard Jones’s remarks about how precious a loving family is, no one knows. History suggests that he rarely listened to advice from anyone.
He had it all. He threw it all away.
Although Sue Harris and her children are safe, there are thousands of women and children who are not. They are somewhere along the inexorable progression from the promise of love to disappointment to isolation to emotional abuse to physical abuse to fear to loss of hope, and finally to either divorce or death.
It shouldn’t be that way. People like Detectives Cloyd Steiger and Sharon Stevens, prosecutors Marilyn Brenneman and Cheryl Snow, and survivors like Sue Harris Jensen are trying to make life happier and safer for those who are still afraid of someone who should love and care for them.
Every domestic violence support group in America needs our donations of money, clothing, furniture, toys, vehicles, shelter, and time. Go to www.domesticviolence.com to contact the groups near you.
The
Antiques
Dealer’s Wife
Literature is rife with stories of men who draw women to themselves the way some flowers attract butterflies. They are the Svengalis and the Bluebeards of fiction. They range from Rudolph Valentino to Frank Sinatra to Elvis Presley to the most current heartthrob on television. At cocktail parties or college lecture halls, these men are always surrounded by attractive women who ooh and ahh and nod their heads with exaggerated agreement about whatever opinion they voice. They brim with charisma, even when they may not be all that handsome. And if they are handsome, too, their feminine targets are that much easier to seduce.
Raoul Guy Rockwell was definitely a charmer, as dangerous as he was compelling. Wealthy Seattle matrons and single women hung on his every word, and many of them secretly—or not so secretly—thought seriously about having an affair with him.
Some of them ventured beyond the thought, captivated by his hypnotic stare and the sharp scent of his English lime cologne and the smell of the rich tobacco blend in his ever-present pipe.
Rockwell’s story rose to the surface shortly before my own years as a police officer in the Seattle Police Department. The detective sergeant who tracked him was a man I had worked with on several sexual assault cases when he was a patrol officer and I was a very gullible and inexperienced investigator in the Women’s Division (as we were known then).
I’ve never written this case before, but it has always been a big part
of my memory of early days in the department. It is grotesque, baffling, fascinating, and frustrating. Later in my life, I had a writing studio in a houseboat on Lake Union, close by where the murder mystery happened. My neighbors had never heard of the mysterious Raoul Guy Rockwell and didn’t know of the massive police operation that took place in the fall of 1960. It seemed impossible to me that such a headline story could evaporate like the early morning fog over the lake when the sun penetrated it.
And yet I’m sure there are many who will remember this story, and who have wondered for decades whatever became of the man who captivated his fans for a few years and then vanished, leaving hundreds of questions behind.
When this mystery began in the spring of 1960, John F. Kennedy had just announced his candidacy for president, America’s first seven astronauts were learning to live in zero gravity, and “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” topped the music charts.
“The Twist” was the most popular dance in the country.
It was another time. Still, revisiting the saga of Raoul Guy Rockwell makes one wonder how anyone aware of his crimes could forget him.
Raoul Guy rockwell, who was always referred to by all three of his names, suddenly appeared in the art and antiques world of Seattle in the late 1950s. No one was sure where he had come from, and later, even less sure of where he had gone. He wasn’t yet forty-five, although he seemed more mature. He opened an antiques gallery in a ramshackle three-story house close to a houseboat community on Fairview Avenue East, a structure repaired willy-nilly over previous decades with whatever was handy, so that part of it had cedar shakes and other sections plain board siding. The windows didn’t match, and some were covered with plastic sheeting instead of storm windows to keep out the rain. Rockwell decorated the entryway with stained-glass windows he had purchased when an old church was demolished, but he didn’t pain the exterior.