Don't Look Behind You

by Ann Rule

  From 2003 to 2005, the backbreaking work of exploring the earth for some sign of Joann Hansen continued. Luckily, there were many volunteers who joined Cindy and Ty in their sad project, ready to dig with shovels. They didn’t have enough money to rent machines that would drill and then lift cores of dirt and “anomalies” out of the ground. Neither did the King County budget.

  It was no wonder that both Ty and Cindy were burned out in their frustrating goal to find Joann and give her a proper burial where those who loved her could visit her and place flowers on her grave.

  But, like phoenixes rising from the ashes, they always found new energy to continue.

  Chapter Sixteen

  A DIFFERENT APPROACH

  Stymied by all the blocked pathways he had encountered, Ty Hansen had something else he needed to do. That was to confront his father with what he believed to be the truth. If he never found his lost mother, at least he could tell his father that he knew finally that she had never deliberately left him and his siblings. He wanted to get that message to the old man and accuse him of her murder.

  He tried to do that in 2005 and 2006, but Bob turned a deaf ear and swore at him, threatening to call police if Ty didn’t get off his property.

  And then it was early in 2008.

  Ty entered Bob Hansen’s phone number into his cell phone and hit “talk.” He heard an almost endless ringing before it went to voice mail. He wondered if his father had caller ID and was deliberately avoiding talking with him. He might be sitting there, listening. Maybe he had the kind of answering machine where he could hear his callers leave a message.

  Ty was determined to have his say; if he had to leave a message instead of confronting the old man, he would do that. He had missed the “beep” while debating what he should do, and he quickly redialed, and this time he began to speak when he heard the shrill tone.

  “I know our mother never left us on purpose,” Ty said. “I know you killed her—and I’m going to prove it.

  “You hid her somewhere,” Ty said evenly. “You murdered her way back in 1962. What did you do with her body?”

  There was only silence on the other end of the line.

  “I won’t stop until I find her bones!” Ty shouted, before he hung up. “Not until I find her bones!”

  That explained one of the yellow notes that Kathleen Huget found tacked to Bob’s wall, the one that baffled her the most.

  The frightened old man listening to that message wrote those words on a yellow note:

  “Ty: ‘I won’t stop until I find her bones!’”

  Bob Hansen was growing more paranoid, perhaps even having waking nightmares as many elderly people do. He had printed another note in late August:

  “2 MEN IN BACKYARD. THEY RAN AND JUMPED BACK FENCE—ONE GUY DROPPED BACKPACK.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  NOT QUITE CLOSURE

  Ty Hansen had begun his quest full of resentment and rage. He was angry that he had lost his mother so early that he couldn’t even remember her, angry at the physical and mental abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He wanted some kind of justice, an ending to the lies about Joann that would avenge his mother—but he also wanted to punish his father. He may not have thought about this aspect of his crusade when he set out.

  There came a point, however, when Ty realized that it wasn’t all about him and his pain and loss. He was nearing fifty now. In a way, he had come to know the pretty dark-haired woman who had undoubtedly perished when she was much younger than he was. Through her friends who had never forgotten her, Ty’s blurry picture of his mom began to fill in and take shape. He realized that she had lost far more than he had.

  “And I also saw that my mother’s disappearance had hurt so many people and changed their lives, and not for the better. I certainly didn’t give up trying to find out the truth, but I wasn’t just thinking about myself any longer.

  “I guess, in that moment, I finally grew up.”

  Bob Hansen’s eighty-fourth birthday was on October 13, 2008. Ty told Cindy that he wanted to go see his father.

  Even though Bob hadn’t threatened Cindy when she knocked on his door, she was worried about what he might do when he saw Ty. He’d had nothing to do with either Ty or Nicole for years, and she had seen his delight in criticizing both of his sons during the hour she’d spent with him.

  Like everyone else who either knew Bob or knew of his reputation for violence, she was afraid for Ty.

  But Ty was adamant. Bob Hansen’s birthday fell on a Monday, and the two of them drove to Auburn. Alongside the road, the vine maples were scarlet and the big leaf maples golden as they neared the town where Bob lived.

  They parked a few doors down the street from the neat yellow house that was now Bob’s “pad” in America when he wasn’t in Costa Rica. But when Ty knocked on the door, there was no answer—and there was no vehicle in the driveway.

  Ty sensed that time was running out for his father. “I had gone through several of the first stages of grief by then,” he recalls. “I was probably at a point of acceptance that my mother was dead, and I would still look for her, but I guess I wanted a final word with my father, some kind of peaceful conversation.”

  They waited for a long time; Ty was convinced his father was living there and determined to wait until he got home.

  “I didn’t realize then how frightened Cindy really was to be there.”

  More than an hour later, Bob Hansen’s Toyota 4Runner came down the street and turned into his driveway, coasting into the garage.

  After the old man crawled awkwardly out of the driver’s seat, he went to the back of his SUV and was rummaging around, looking for something. Ty, followed by a nervous Cindy, walked up and they were standing behind him as he closed the rear hatch.

  Bob Hansen was caught off guard as he turned around, shocked to see Ty.

  “I want to talk to you,” Ty said, and Bob turned away from him.

  His father had grown very old, and he seemed afraid.

  “Dad!” Ty called. “I forgive you. Do you hear me? I forgive you!”

  The elderly man slowed down only slightly.

  “I hope you can forgive me?” Ty shouted. He didn’t regret his long hunt to find out what had happened to his mother, or feel guilty about contacting the sheriff. At the same time he realized that it must be hard on the old man.

  Ty was torn, pulled in two directions. He and Nick had worked with their dad when they were younger, they’d learned things from him—if not ethics, then skills that they’d been able to use.

  The vacations and trips had been fun once in a while—even though they never quite got over waiting for their father to get mad about something. Kandy Kay was gone, and Nicole had a completely different life. Ty’s uncle Ken was gone.

  “What I would have given to have a father like my uncle Ken,” Ty lamented. “He was a really good man.”

  Ty still didn’t trust his father; he still believed that his father had destroyed his mother—and he didn’t want to spend time with him. He didn’t want anything from him. But he hated the idea that one of them would die full of hate.

  “Dad,” Ty called again, “can you forgive me?”

  Bob Hansen half-turned toward Ty, and his son could see hatred in his eyes. He brought his hand up and brusquely signaled with it in a dismissive gesture.

  “Get the hell off my property!” Bob snarled. “You son of a bitch!”

  Cindy tugged at Ty’s arm and urged him to come back to their car. Bob had always had a lot of guns and ammunition in his houses, and there was no telling what he might do.

  For an instant, the world stood still—and then Bob limped toward his house and disappeared. For Ty, there was a measure of satisfaction. His father had always forbidden them to mention their mother’s name to him. And now the old man had had no choice but to hear Ty’s angry accusations. Would it have any impact on him?

  It was over so quickly. Ty hadn’t said everything he wanted to, and he knew
he might never know what his father’s reaction was.

  Marv Milosevich, however, heard about the confrontation between Ty and Bob.

  “Bob told me that Ty scared him to death,” Marv said when interviewed. “Bob said, ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’”

  Ty had no intention of killing his father, but he wanted some justice for his mother. He had frightened Bob, long after the years when he had been terrified by his father.

  Later, Ty tried once more to speak to his father but was unsuccessful. “Whenever I’d come up to Washington State, I’d make it a point to drive by his house,” Ty recalls. “I didn’t feel there was any chance of talking to my dad, but I wanted him to see my car go by and know that I hadn’t given up trying to find what had happened to our mother.”

  The encounter on his birthday only served to convince Bob Hansen that he needed to move to Costa Rica for good as soon as possible. He contacted an attorney in Washington and asked him to do research on how he could become a Costa Rican citizen.

  He planned to take all his assets with him and hide them in Costa Rica.

  Bob thought it would be far easier than it was. Bizarrely—since he didn’t trust either of his living children—Bob had made friends with an American couple who had become Costa Rican citizens decades earlier. Herb Stuart* and his wife, Lily,* were about the age of Ty and Nicole, and they seemed to dote on the aging man. He had known them for twenty-five years.

  But Costa Rican officials made immigration more and more difficult, and the Stuarts assured Bob that they could be his sponsors so he could achieve citizenship in Costa Rica.

  But Herb Stuart said it would take money. Lots of money.

  Although Bob usually kept his financial business close to his vest, Marv Milosevich believes Bob advanced as much as half a million dollars to the Stuarts. Either they told him or he had heard somewhere that it would take that much to prove his good faith to the proper government offices.

  When Marv Milosevich heard that, he attempted to warn Bob that it sounded fishy to him. “I spent an hour and a half drinking coffee with Herb Stuart when he came up here,” Marv said. “Apparently, he had told Bob that he had to prove to the Costa Rican government that he had enough funds to take care of himself so he wouldn’t be a burden on his chosen country. Herb figured it had to be at least a million dollars. He told me that he and his wife were going to be Bob’s ‘personal advocates.’

  “In my opinion, that guy was a con man, and Bob fell for it. I tried to warn him but he trusted Herb Stuart.”

  Bob Hansen wasn’t the kind of immigrant that most countries would covet. There was still the mystery of the missing girl who’d gone hiking with him, and although he never served more than overnight jail time—including the sentence (then) Judge Duncan Bonjorni gave him—Bob had a record of numerous arrests in the Northwest. Most of them stemmed from fights where he’d physically hurt people or destroyed property.

  He was required to present many documents to validate statements he’d given Costa Rican officials. He scrambled to get his birth certificate and proof of his place of birth in Junction City, Oregon, and he filled out a number of forms that he sent to the capital in Salem. He asked that his documentation be taken care of with all possible speed.

  Hansen also contacted the Washington State Patrol offices to obtain a record of any rap sheet of arrests he might have. He seemed to luck out there; his record came back clean. It wasn’t luck, however. Bob had cleverly changed his answers on the WSP form. He gave his birthday as October 16, 1924, instead of October 13, 1924. He also changed his name slightly—from Robert Milton Hansen to Robert Melvin Hansen.

  The WSP report said that they had not found any felony offense under that exact birth date and exact name.

  Whether Bob Hansen had any proof that Herb and Lily Stuart had actually given the half-million dollars he said he’d sent them to immigration authorities in Costa Rica—or not—nobody knows. Marv Milosevich doubts that they did.

  Robert Milton Hansen had hurt people in one way or another all his life. Suddenly, his world was crumbling.

  His efforts to get into Costa Rica as a citizen came to nothing. Officials there refused his application, and much of his fortune was gone. Nevertheless, he drew up a will leaving everything he owned—including his house—to Herb and Lily Stuart! It would be his final revenge on his sons.

  But it wouldn’t be a surprise. Ty had known for decades that he and Nick would get nothing in their father’s will, just as the money set aside for them to collect on their eighteenth birthdays from their mother’s estate had disappeared. They had both accepted that long ago.

  “He really had no one else to leave his assets to,” Ty says. “He had planned to leave them to Marv Milosevich, but he got mad at Marv over something.”

  At last, at eighty-three, Bob Hansen had begun to ponder his own mortality. He had a few of the ailments that came with old age—various aches and pains—but he was basically healthy and still quite strong, strong enough to walk along the Green River for miles every day, picking up trash. He had, however, stopped hunting and fishing.

  He had no one to go with him to pursue the blood sports he had enjoyed for much of his life.

  “When I get old,” he once told Marv Milosevich, “I’m not gonna go to one of them rest homes. You sit in a chair, and they don’t take care of you. I’m gonna go my own way—kill myself.”

  “That’d be hard to do, Bob,” Marv said cautiously.

  “I can manage it—I’ve made up my mind.”

  Since the midnineties, Bob had begun to doubt his own mind. He was forgetting things. To cover up for that, he kept a kind of journal, most pages riddled with misspellings, which Kathleen Huget found. There were also the yellow notes on the walls of his house. He jotted down miscellaneous bits of information—things he’d heard on 60 Minutes or Fox News.

  “Gold—Highest in 62 years”

  “Ford Will Give Buyout to 75,000 employees—from $40,000 to $140,000”

  “Venezuela’s President called Bush a ‘Diablo’—Devel”

  “FEEMA is paying eleven million dollars per night for hotel rooms in Louisiana for flood victims”

  “CATHOLIP BISHOP: No stem cell research, no abortions, no condoms or birth control devices”

  There were scores of notations that seemed to have no pattern, although Hansen focused on countries that controlled oil, elderly celebrities who had died, war, disaster—and occasionally, sex transgender operations. He was either trying to keep his mind alert and current or he was writing down items because he had no one to talk to.

  When Flory was still with him, he listed resorts and trip destinations, along with the names of high-priced hotels and motels.

  He studied his notes constantly, trying to build muscles in his memory.

  Hansen also wrote precise lists of things he had to accomplish, particularly when he was preparing for a visit to Costa Rica. One list had thirty-eight reminders for everything from “Put money in checking account to cover expenses while I’m gone,” to “Unplug refrigerator and freezer—Put rocks in door.”

  What purpose rocks in the refrigerator doors served is obscure.

  Bob Hansen was an intelligent man but a lousy speller. Some of his notes are laughable because of that. He wrote “VIAGRA—Pills for sex—Impudence [sic] Drug.”

  When he commented on President Bill Clinton’s disastrous affair, he wrote “Monica Luinsky or Levinsky, Clinton’s Lover.”

  Hansen also kept track in his journals of how many fish Marv Milosevich had caught. He did not list his own tally of fish.

  From the time he was a young man, he’d kept precise listings of every penny he had spent on the women in his life. Bob Hansen had always considered that they “owed him” for the food they ate and the secondhand clothes he bought them.

  The year 2008 was coming to an end. Marv and LaVonne Milosevich talked about asking Bob to come for Christmas dinner, but knowing that he would put a pall over the festi
vities, they kept putting the decision on that aside. Finally, they decided not to.

  Bob Hansen had finally run out of friends—except for Lily and Herb Stuart in Costa Rica. His estate, estimated to be worth $5 million, would reward them for standing by him. Hansen’s will specifically said that his wife, Joann Cooper Morrison Hansen, had left him, and it was worded in such a way that even if she should ever resurface, he wanted her to have nothing. His children were also disinherited in the will.

  Later, Marv felt guilt about that last Christmas, but he had also become tremendously disappointed in his one-time mentor, the man he had tried valiantly to remain friends with. The meanness in Bob Hansen had only intensified as he had grown older, and there were few comfortable moments to be spent with him.

  Bob was a racist, a miser, a misanthrope, the living image of Ebenezer Scrooge, a white supremacist, and a latter-day Nazi. He continued to blame everyone but himself for his misery. Maybe it had started when he was a little boy—when he had to go with his father to the dreaded Stump Farm, or for some other reason no one knew about.

  It is said that in old age, we become who we were when we were young—only more so. Happy people are fun to be around even when they are long past social security age, and angry people are as sour as dill pickles when they are elderly.

  In his almost eighty-four years, Bob Hansen had become only more paranoid and resentful of others.

  Chapter Eighteen

  THE SILENT HORN

  On Tuesday morning, August 4, 2009, the neighborhood on 14th Avenue in Auburn was very quiet. Forty-seven years earlier plus six days, Joann Hansen had disappeared. Perhaps the date had some meaning for Bob Hansen. Possibly, he had chosen this day at random.

  His next-door neighbor finished his breakfast and realized that he hadn’t heard the familiar “ooga-ooga” of Bob’s antique automobile horn.