Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder

rural county.
    Although Bill wanted to get married soon after he and Sue became engaged, she didn’t want to give up the veteran’s benefits that paid for her tuition, which she would lose if she married. She pointed out the wisdom in that to Bill. They both needed their fathers’ legacies to finish college.
    Reluctantly, Bill agreed that her argument made sense. There were times when they considered getting married before they finished school, but they always concluded they should wait; they were secure in the fact that they loved each other, and neither was jealous or insecure about the stability of their relationship.
    Sue graduated before Bill did—in the summer of 1978, while Bill still had one more semester. She didn’t want to move back to Seattle without him, so she continued on at Washington State and earned a second degree—this time in psychology.
    Although she loved Bill, Sue was surprised when she realized that Bill Jensen was not the popular, outgoing guy she first thought he was. He was actually a loner. Despite the way she had viewed him at their first meeting at the scuba club, he really didn’t have close friends. When they got together with a group, the others tended to be her friends, not his. She understood why he might not trust people enough to get close to them. After his pillar-to-post childhood, when he never really felt that he belonged anywhere, she reasoned, why shouldn’t he take a wait-and-see attitude about people?
    Sue saw that Bill could not keep a roommate, that they moved in and out rapidly, but she didn’t think much of it. There was very little about him that concerned her; when they were alone, they got along fine, and she didn’t find his tendency to dominate conversations a deterrent to their relationship. He might be kind of bossy and even arrogant sometimes, but to her, he was interesting, and he knew so much about many things. She certainly didn’t see him then as boorish and oblivious to other people’s reactions.
    Sue felt sorry for Bill when his mother humiliated him in front of other students in his dorm. “She would get drunk and call him from California, where she was living then,” Sue recalled. “It bothered him so much he got ulcers from the stress. I remember once how angry he was when his mother couldn’t get him on the phone and she called the resident adviser in his dorm. He was so embarrassed to think of how she must have sounded, knowing that she only called when she had been drinking.”
    Bill Jensen was struggling to make a better life for himself, one in which he could leave his birth family behind. He felt no particular allegiance to his mother; he had no reason to. She hadn’t fought to keep him when he was five and the state’s social workers moved in and took him away to a foster home. And she hadn’t been very nice to him when Bill lived with her and a stepfather in California when he was in junior high. Beyond his adopted father, Chuck, Bill had never had any stable roots that would make him feel grounded in the world. Sue understood that, and tried to reassure him that he was a special person, successful and smart, and that he had a great future ahead of him. She loved him and vowed to be the kind of wife who would help him find a happy life.
    The only disturbing experience Sue had with Bill in college was at his nineteenth birthday party. They had gone out with some friends, and both of them had a little too much to drink. Although she couldn’t even remember what they argued about, it was serious enough for him to put his hands on her in anger, and she was left with black and purple marks where he’d grabbed her arms.
    The fracas at Bill’s birthday celebration had escalated to a point where somebody called the police, and they quickly broke up the party.
    Sue would remember a long time later that the grad student who was the resident adviser in her dorm had looked closely at her bruised arms and warned her to be careful, saying, “This may be your first time—but it won’t be the last time he hurts you.”
    Sue listened to her adviser, but it didn’t sink in and she didn’t believe it. She loved Bill, and she was anxious to make up with him. “I heard what he was saying—but I knew he couldn’t be talking about Bill. He didn’t know him the way I did.”
    Bill was a young man in a hurry, and he earned his bachelor’s degree at Washington State University in three and a half years. When he did, he and Sue moved home