Smoke, Mirrors, and Murder and Other True Cases Read online

  Christmas 2002 was bleak. The old traditions seemed to mock Sue, Jenny, and Scott. The year ahead seemed to hold danger instead of promise.

  Sue Jensen now firmly believed that she was going to “end up dead” when Bill finally reached his boiling point. That would be his “final word,” the revenge he always sought. She hadn’t spoken to him in months, but she discovered on New Year’s Eve that Bill had canceled their medical insurance. Sue couldn’t apply under her own name until she was legally divorced, and it could be catastrophic for them to risk going without it. When Scott called Bill the first week in January 2003, she picked up the phone.

  “I told him all he had to do was e-mail the insurance company and we would be reinstated.”

  With Scott’s continuing medical expenses, they desperately needed to have medical coverage. They argued. And Sue made a terrible mistake; she told Bill that he would go to jail if he didn’t stop acting in contempt of court orders.

  His voice grew steely.

  “If I go to jail, you’re going to your grave.”

  Bill also threatened John Compatore’s life. By making those death threats, he had violated the order of protection.

  On January 21, 2003, Bill Jensen’s harassment reached such a peak that Sue filed felony–domestic–violence charges against him. He was arrested, but he bailed out within a day. His adopted father, Chuck Jensen, put up his bail. Bill showed up for his court date on those charges, but Sue had been warned by a domestic violence victim’s advocate not to subject herself to that.

  Bill turned her absence into a win for himself; he obtained an order of protection against her.

  And all the while, Sue’s fear that Bill would do something violent toward her—and even toward their children—grew. The more he lost control of his own life, the more furious he became. His physical strength was gone, diminished when he failed to take advantage of physical therapy. Whether he really suffered from cardiac problems or leukemia—which he now claimed to have—Sue didn’t know.

  His financial empire had collapsed, and his career in law enforcement was over. Always before he had been able to blame Sue for what went wrong in his life. Of course, he still did, but any reprisals against her had to be done from a distance.

  Bill had an apartment where he could look down on a strip mall, a shopping area Sue had always frequented. One night, she and Scott had gone to Blockbuster to rent a video, and he apparently spotted her car. Close to midnight, she got a phone call from the Newcastle Police Department, in whose jurisdiction Bill’s apartment was located.

  “We understand you are harassing your husband,” an officer began. “You were stalking him at his apartment.”

  Sue put Scott on the phone. He volunteered that he and his mother had picked up a movie and then gone straight home, and they hadn’t gone to his father’s apartment. That seemed to satisfy the police.

  Bill next claimed that Sue had phoned him and threatened to kill him on at least two occasions. It was a ridiculous accusation. Sue was doing her best to maintain some kind of stable home for her children, although she knew it was a futile endeavor. They were full of teenage rage, missing the father they had once admired and loved, sometimes blaming her for the breakup of her marriage. Even when they sent him letters blaming him for deserting them, she knew they still loved him.

  Sue’s neighbors and friends had rallied around her when they witnessed the debacle of Bill’s departure from their home after the long standoff with police. Many of them gave statements and depositions about what they had observed in the Jensens’ volatile marriage. When he showed up at Scott’s or Jenny’s games, people turned away from him. Some of them were afraid of him; some were disgusted by his vendetta against his estranged wife.

  But almost everyone was concerned about what he might do. John Compatore stood beside Sue, and so did her sister, Carol. But basically she felt alone, stalked by a man who wouldn’t let her go, who told anyone who would listen that Sue had ruined his life. “She’s almost forced me to become a street person.”

  It didn’t matter that it was Bill who had thrown money away with abandon, most of it Sue’s. He wasn’t on the street, but he no longer had hundreds of thousands of dollars at his disposal.

  On Wednesday night, February 26, 2003, five days after the late-night phone call from police, Sue was cooking supper at 6:30. She heard a knock on their front door, and she opened it to find several Newcastle Police officers standing there. Thinking that they were responding to her complaint about Bill’s violation of the protective order, she invited them in and asked them if they would like a cup of coffee.

  “I was walking toward the kitchen,” she said, “when they told me to turn around and put my hands behind my back. They had come to arrest me!”

  Stunned, with Scott watching, Sue allowed herself to be handcuffed as the officers told her that Bill had reported that she had barged into his apartment, shouting, “I’m going to kill you, you bastard!”

  Had this been true, she would have violated the protection order he had obtained against her! The eighteen-year-old girl who was living with him had backed up Bill’s accusations, repeating what he told the police as if she had memorized it. Even though the girl had a record of arrests for shoplifting, forgery, and identity theft, her word was good enough to have Sue arrested.

  The nightmare was growing more bizarre.

  Scott would be alone until Jenny came home, and Sue was desperately upset at having to leave him, in shock to find herself being put into the backseat of a patrol car. She had gone on some errands at the strip mall near Bill’s apartment, but spying on him was the last thing she had any desire to do. She knew she could account for every place she had been that afternoon, but the police told her she would have to go to jail first, and provide that information in the morning.

  “Luckily,” she said, “we passed Jenny coming home, and they stopped and let me talk to her. She was more upset than I was, but she said she would call my sister and another friend, and see that someone would be at the house all night with them.”

  It seemed impossible; Sue had feared being killed, but she had never imagined that she would go to jail. But there she was, fingerprinted, mugged, strip-searched, and placed into a cell with other women in the King County Jail.

  She didn’t sleep all night. In the morning, the prosecutor’s office called down to the jail and said, “Get her out of there—now!”

  As it happened, Sue could indeed account for every minute of the afternoon of February 26. She had picked Scott up from middle school about 3:20, visited with his tutor until 3:45, purchased a prescription at the Coal Creek Shopping Center at 3:51, and gone to the Safeway supermarket; she had receipts with the times and date stamped on them. She had even run into several friends who remembered talking with her. When she returned home, she’d sent several e-mails, and they, of course, had the time and date on them.

  She never had to go to court on the alleged violation of Bill’s order of protection against her. But being right and having proof weren’t nearly enough to erase the fear that had begun to walk with Sue Jensen everywhere she went. She couldn’t sleep, and she broke out in hives.

  “Even the dog got hives,” she told a friend. “My hands shake so badly that I drop things all the time.”

  The dog—Sue’s beloved Great Dane—was one line of protection for her, about the only thing that allowed Sue to have a few hours of sleep at night.

  Sue felt that if she could go forward with her felony–domestic–violence charges against Bill, she might be able to find a modicum of safety. A year earlier she wouldn’t have had the nerve. Now she felt as if she had nothing to lose, and she wrote to Norm Maleng, the King County prosecutor, and to the King County Sheriff’s Office asking for help in bringing those charges against Bill.

  She contacted Diane Wetendorf, whose national organization helps domestic partners of the small percentage of police officers and firefighters who abuse the power that their careers give them.


  Wetendorf’s site (www.abuseofpower.info/Wetendorf.htm) has helped many victims who have hidden the domestic abuse they suffer, covering up their stories. Diane Wetendorf’s Web site declares its purpose:

  Our need to be heard

  and to be visible is beginning to overcome

  Our fear.

  We are breaking our silence.

  We are no longer invisible.

  We are not alone.

  And Sue did feel less alone, but she was no less frightened. Bill had not beaten her down as she knew he’d expected to do. She was on the offensive and that was infinitely dangerous. She didn’t want anything more than she had wanted in the beginning—only to be free, and to have enough of their family’s assets so she could take care of Scott and Jenny. But she knew instinctively that she couldn’t back down. Bill wouldn’t go away. He would bide his time, and then he would kill her.

  He had made that dread promise to her when he drew his finger across his neck, and when he told her she would go to her grave.

  Sue was getting pledges of support from the prosecutor, the sheriff, the county executive—but none of them seemed aware of the urgency she felt. She feared she might well be dead before those assurances were put into play.

  And then tragedy struck—a city away, a county away—to another woman who had tried in vain to divorce her policeman husband. The scenario was so familiar to Sue Jensen, it might well have been her story.

  Crystal Brame was thirty-five, the lovely young wife of David Brame, the chief of police in Tacoma, Washington. The Brames had a son and a daughter, and in television coverage of Chief Brame’s activities, Crystal always appeared to be gazing at her husband with pride and love. But in truth, she had been living a life of desperate captivity, adhering to a positive public image under her husband’s orders, but held hostage in a marriage where she had no freedom at all. David Brame kept track of every single move Crystal made. He even made her weigh herself in front of him, warning her she must not get fat. She wasn’t even allowed to talk with her neighbors.

  Brame was so obsessed with controlling his wife that Crystal had reached a point where she could no longer stand to remain in her marriage.

  When she asked for a divorce, she had written her own death warrant. She had been warned, but with the help of a counselor and her family, she was trying to break free. When Crystal Brame wanted to leave, David Brame had followed her, choked her, threatened her life. He had warned her that he hadn’t even begun to punish her and that she hadn’t seen anything yet.

  On April 26, 2003, Crystal and the Brames’ two young children were in a shopping mall parking lot in Gig Harbor, where they lived. Crystal had spotted the Tacoma Police vehicle following her, and recognized her estranged husband. She didn’t have a chance. In front of horrified onlookers, David Brame shot his wife in the head with his department-issued handgun. And then he committed suicide, with a bullet to his own head.

  Their children were witnesses to the tragedy. Crystal Brame clung to life for seven days, and then she, too, died. Her death shook Washington residents, and there were outcries demanding to know why someone hadn’t foreseen David Brame’s dangerousness and done something before it was too late. Eventually, heads rolled in Tacoma city government.

  But Crystal Brame was still dead.

  Sue Jensen grieved for Crystal Brame and truly understood what it was like to have walked in the same shoes. She felt ice in her veins as she believed she was glimpsing her own future. There should have been some way for Crystal to protect herself, but there wasn’t. And there was no way for Sue to save herself.

  Every wall she put up had collapsed. Restraining orders were, in the end, useless when she was alone. She couldn’t be alert all the time. If Bill intended to kill her, she knew, he would find a way. What sleep she did find was permeated with horrible nightmares. Bill had told Jenny that her mother and her aunt Carol “deserved to die.” He had warned Scott that he would probably have to grow up without either of his parents, hinting broadly that they would both be dead.

  There was death all around her, and Sue could no longer see a way out.

  Sue’s attorney, John Compatore, was getting under Bill’s skin, and so he too became a target. Bill threatened him with violent reprisal. Compatore lived in a quiet neighborhood, a low-crime area. Sometime in April 2003, the tires on his wife’s car went flat after she’d driven only a block from their garage. On inspection, Compatore found nails had penetrated the side walls. He knew the garage floor was perfectly clean and there were no nails there. A month or so later, her tire went flat again. Again, there was a nail in it. Compatore detected signs shortly afterward that indicated someone had attempted to burglarize his home.

  Compatore wrote to county authorities, echoing Sue’s fears: “I am a retired police officer and I know that Bill Jensen is a dangerous man. I would trust implicitly what Susan Jensen can tell you about her husband.”

  After wading through a morass of delays, postponements, and roadblocks Bill Jensen had thrown up to stop Sue from getting a divorce, even Compatore began to wonder if Bill would ever be convicted for any of his acts of harassment.

  Jensen had now threatened Sue and both of her attorneys. He had gone through five attorneys himself, scaring them away when they learned of his harassment and when he lied to them consistently. He had told at least two witnesses that he understood how someone could “go postal.”

  It was May 2003, and Sue feared that even her death might not be enough to satisfy Bill’s rage. “Going postal” was a term that suggested an episode of mass murder. She wondered if it would take a bloodbath of major-headline proportions to satisfy Bill.

  There was a warrant out for Bill’s arrest for threatening John Compatore, but once again, no one could find Bill. He wasn’t living in his apartment. He was supposed to appear in court on May 22, but he didn’t show up. His father had put up his house for Bill’s bail in his earlier arrest, and risked losing it now.

  It was more frightening, somehow, not to know where Bill was. On her lawyer’s advice, Sue left town for the weekend. If Bill should have to go to jail, he would be so angry. He was making more threats to any number of people, many of them perfect strangers. When a hospital pharmacist refused to refill one of Bill’s pain medications, even he became the target for a veiled warning.

  Sue froze as she saw a stranger lurking across the street from her house. “I was sure it was a hit man,” she said. “And I knew that I couldn’t make it into my house as he started toward me. My legs wouldn’t move. I was actually relieved when he held out his hand, and it was only an order of protection that Bill had filed against me.”

  Sue waited for the other, probably fatal, shoe to drop.

  Jenny was going to graduate from high school on June 18, 2003, and the ceremonies would be held in the Hec Edmondson Pavilion at the University of Washington. All the girls who had been on the teams Bill had coached since Jenny was five would be graduating too. They had become the focus of some of Bill’s rage. Sue knew Bill felt betrayed by both the parents and the team members—none of whom were friendly to him any longer when he occasionally showed up at games.

  It was true that Bill’s bizarre behavior had stamped him as a pariah in his old neighborhood, and he had often complained how bitter he was about their lack of gratitude for all he had done for his teams. He had volunteered his time coaching them, but nobody appreciated him or gave him credit for all he had done, and he resented them mightily.

  Jenny’s approaching graduation ceremony frightened Sue more than anything. She knew that Bill planned to attend, and it seemed like a venue where he might, indeed, “go postal.”

  Something was going to happen, but Sue didn’t know when or what it would be.

  Three

  A Deadly Conspiracy

  With the help of Assistant District Attorney Kathryn Kim in the King County prosecutor’s Domestic Violence Unit, Sue pursued her attempts to have Bill go to trial for felony harassment and for
his violations of the no-contact order. Yet no one involved felt that charges against Bill would stick. Despite her police record, the young woman who lived with him was considered a credible witness. If Bill went to jail, as an ex-police officer he would be in great danger, another reason he might not be prosecuted as vigorously as an ordinary person on the street. Despite what had happened in the Brame case, Bill Jensen tended to come across as no more than an irritating, mean-spirited, and petulant man who was trying to make his wife miserable, which is not, technically, a crime.

  The woods—and the divorce courts—were full of men like that. Even with all of the guns he had, he himself didn’t seem capable of real violence. Except for the 2001 arbitration meeting with Sue and her attorney, Bill hadn’t come near Sue. He had manipulated bank accounts, stocks, and vehicles, and had misused credit cards, but he hadn’t hurt her physically since she’d asked him to leave.

  Bill Jensen now weighed over four hundred pounds, and—according to him—he had a bad knee, a bad back, diabetes, chronic fatigue syndrome, depression, hypertension, cardiac problems, festering skin infections, and cancer. He was broke and had no means of support other than his disability payments. He cried to anyone who would listen that his wife was very wealthy.

  On May 1, 2003, Jensen described his predicament. “She has used her wealth and ��strength’ to put me out on the street and nearly caused me to become a ‘street person.’ Mrs. Jensen clearly decided she no longer wanted to live with a disabled man suffering from leukemia,” he wrote in an attempt to have John Compatore censured by the Washington State Bar for unprofessional conduct.

  “So she threw me out on the street in June 2001…. Ms. Jensen has so flagrantly lied, put on a charade and air[ed]—to everyone…her attorneys, judges, prosecutors, family, friends, and our children that I am some sort of drug addicted and violent man. This I am not.”

  How dangerous could he actually be? And where was he?