Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (25 page)

“Tracking her social security number,” Pat said, “we found that she never took a job over all those years. Her social security number didn’t show up anywhere.”

When people choose—for whatever reason—to leave of their own volition, they invariably leave a paper trail: money missing from their bank accounts, applications for employment, driver’s licenses, gas card records. It isn’t that easy to just disappear.

Joann Hansen left nothing at all; she might as well have been abducted by aliens and whisked away in a spacecraft.

Although local gossip said that Bob had murdered Joann and hidden her body, he would have had to have done a clever job at that. No shred of her showed up.

There was never a real police investigation, only a haphazard missing complaint from a husband who didn’t seem that disturbed that his wife might be in danger.

Although Bob had law enforcement acquaintances, he wasn’t close enough for any of them to pull back on investigating him. Some of them liked him well enough and even felt sorry for the troubles he had. Still, most of his male friends were cautious around Bob and didn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. His temper was legendary. He could do a lot of damage when he was blind with rage.

To the outside world, he was the guy whose wife had run off and left him to take care of three little kids alone.

And that, of course, was the image he wanted to portray.

For every victim
of violent crime, there are almost always several more people who suffer from the fallout of the tragedy. No one can accurately predict what will happen to children who lose a parent, or who suffer from childhood abuse. Some can override their sadness and loss and become well-adjusted adults; others are traumatized forever after.

When Joann Hansen went out of her children’s lives, they lost the key person who had always made them feel loved and safe. Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were only four, three, and two, and Bob had to hire babysitters. He didn’t soften his answers to their questions about “Where’s Mommy?” Rather, he cruelly told them that their mother didn’t care about them—that she had run away from them and wouldn’t be back.

Nick Hansen was the oldest, nearly five, and he probably missed his mother the most. Although he had precious few memories of her, at least he had a few; his younger siblings had none at all.

“I
can
remember being in a car with my mother, and she was crying. Another time, she was taking me to the ocean. But that’s all that I recall—other than the feeling of being safe and warm in her arms—and her taking care of me.

“I recall asking my father where my mommy was—can see him clearly in my mind, sitting in his recliner chair. He didn’t want to talk about her at all. He just said, ‘She’s gone.’”

Strangely, Nick’s very earliest memory is not about his mother. Rather, Nick recalls an odd incident that he believes happened to one of the multitude of babysitters Bob Hansen hired.

“I don’t remember how it happened, but she accidentally cut her wrist and she must have sliced into an artery because I saw blood spurting all over the kitchen.”

What he really saw is a matter of conjecture. It’s quite possible that Nick is remembering his mother’s murder—but his mind would not allow him to recall Joann bleeding profusely.

After intensive therapy, Nick Hansen believes that his response to having his mother suddenly disappear from his life was to turn to “infantilism.” He didn’t want to be a big boy any longer; he wanted to wear diapers and eat baby food like Kandy Kay and Ty did.

He could not cope with his life as the oldest child in a home without a mother.

Kandy Kay and Ty felt the loss of Joann, too, but it was more diffuse. They were sometimes overwhelmingly sad, but they could not explain why. They were simply too
young. When pressed, Bob Hansen told all three of his children that their mother had gone away and left them.

And they believed him. They had no other choice. With Joann out of their young lives, they no longer saw Patricia Martin either. Patricia had been like an aunt, even a second mother, but Bob would have nothing to do with her. All his children knew was that Bob was there; he cooked breakfast and supper. They still had Christmases, and their father sometimes took them on vacation trips. As always, he took dozens of photographs of himself and his children. It certainly looked as though they were a happy family—even though they didn’t have a mother.

That wasn’t remotely true.

It was almost as if Bob Hansen lived two lives. One was what happened inside the walls of his house—a life where he was cruel and abusive to his children—and the other was the world in the photographs he took, the pictures that showed a perfect little family.

After seven years passed, Joann Ellen Hansen was declared legally dead.

Ty Hansen remembers visiting at his uncle Ken Hansen’s house and playing with Ken and their aunt Lorene’s two daughters. “They had a real family—a real home. I always wished that I could be in a family like that. We had Thanksgivings and Christmases with them.

“Our life was, ah …
isolated
… that’s the only way I can describe it. We weren’t like other families at all.”

Nick, too, has good memories of being in his paternal uncle’s home for holidays. “They were all good to us,” he says. “And they had a player piano. I used to love that.”

Both the Hansen boys remember that their father took them and their sister on trips and vacations. “We were kids—we had fun on some of the trips,” Ty says. “We stopped asking about our mother because he didn’t like to hear anything about that.”

Patricia Martin could not forget Joann Hansen, and she didn’t want to. Every time she looked at the palm prints that Joann had pressed into the wet cement in the foundation of Pat’s house, she felt the pang of loss—and of frustration. Pat was afraid to confront Bob, but she called him fifty times a day, only to hang up when he answered. If all she could do was make him nervous, she was going to do that.

“He figured out soon enough that it was me calling him. He called the police, and they called me and told me to stop, that he was dangerous.”

If they thought he was dangerous, she wondered why they weren’t out looking for Joann.

Bob Hansen was eager to take his boys hunting and fishing, and as soon as they could hold a light rifle or a fishing pole, he took them with him to his favorite hunting spots, mostly on the other side of the Cascade Mountains, particularly Banks Lake in Grant and Douglas counties. They camped out, sped around lakes on a boat Bob owned, and went waterskiing.

Bob always insisted that they take a camera with them, and he took myriad photographs—at their camp sites or
of his small boys holding up their unfortunate, dead and bleeding prey.

Although his hobbies were violent, Bob bragged that his children enjoyed their hunting trips with him. He appeared to be the epitome of the loving father who was doing his best to spend time with his motherless children. Joann had long since become known as the heedless, selfish mother who had followed her own dreams—even if it meant abandoning her children.

Joannn’s family, friends, and her attorney were convinced that wasn’t what happened, and they did what they could to find her. They had no luck. Neither did the private investigators who Joann’s parents hired. Bob wouldn’t talk to them, and they found no other paths they could follow.

Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty didn’t know they had a half brother: Bobby Morrison. Nick and Kandy Kay might have had a vague memory of him from when they were toddlers, but Ty certainly wasn’t old enough to remember him. They didn’t know Patricia Martin. Nor did they know they had relatives on their mother’s side who loved them. Bob had cut all ties with anyone connected to Joann. Their father filled their world—figuratively and actually. He was so tall, so big, and his voice rumbled. He didn’t want them to bond with anyone but him.

In his way, he may have cared for them more than he cared for anyone else in his life—but Bob Hansen seemed incapable of any real sensitivity except how he himself felt. He acted without thinking, particularly when he was angry. He seemed incapable of empathy, never understanding how
other people felt—even his own small children. He gave them everything material that he thought they needed—but, most of all, he lacked tenderness.

And they needed that.

When Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were barely out of Mrs. Moses’s private kindergarten in Des Moines, they were pretty much on their own. They no longer had babysitters. Bob was making good money in the construction boom that hit America in the sixties and early seventies, and that meant long hours on the job. His three children quickly learned to fend for themselves.

“Nobody knew it,” Ty says, “but we walked to Mrs. Moses’s kindergarten class, which was in the basement of Des Moines Elementary. It was about seven or eight blocks from our house, and we had to cross Kent Des Moines Road first, which was a really busy street. Sometimes a babysitter would see us across that road, and sometimes not.”

In the annual photos that Mrs. Moses had taken of her class, the Hansen children wore clothes that were neat and clean, their hair was cut, and no one could pick them out as children who were basically taking care of themselves. Nick and my daughter, Leslie, were in the same kindergarten class, and years later Ty and my son, Andy, were friends in junior high school and played baseball together.

Oddly, perhaps, none of my five children recall Kandy Kay. That may be because the Hansen children attended another elementary school in the Highline school district. Students whose addresses fell north of the Kent Des
Moines Road could choose between Des Moines Elementary and Parkside. All three of the Hansen kids chose Parkside, although they would meet up again with their friends from Rilda Moses’s kindergarten when everybody went to Pacific Junior High School.

Kandy Kay was obviously her father’s favorite, and he let her do what she wanted.

In 1967 Barbara Snyder (née Kuehne) moved to Des Moines with her family from their former home in Cleveland. On her first day at Parkside School, her third grade teacher asked for volunteers who would show “the new girl” around the school. Kandy Kay Hansen raised her hand immediately, and that was the beginning of a lifelong friendship.

“Kandy was so good to me,” Barbara Kuehne Snyder recalls more than forty years later. “I missed Cleveland and my friends there, but I soon felt at home in Des Moines.”

Barbara spent a lot of time in the brown house on Marine View Drive. Bob allowed his children to bring their friends home after school and on weekends and holidays. He himself was often working, but he laid down rules that they all had to follow.

Barb Snyder remembers that all of the Hansen children were very talented. “Kandy played the saxophone and I played the clarinet. Nick was a musical genius—a genius at almost everything, although he didn’t spend much time with us.

“We had a band for a while,” Barb said. “Kandy, Ty, me, and Greg Hardman.”

Nick Hansen wasn’t a member of their band; he got together with his own group of friends who enjoyed music.

Nick played all the woodwind instruments—clarinet, saxophone, flute, and bassoon. His prime musical skill, however, was as an arranger. When he was in sixth grade, he did his first arrangements for the school band, as he would for the bands of every school he attended.

“My dad really didn’t want me to be a musician,” Nick says. “When I wanted to go to Kent-Meridian High School—which was out of our school district—he didn’t approve. But he was finally convinced when my teachers said that was where the best music curriculum was. They also had a good math program.”

Kent-Meridian High School was more than a dozen miles from where Nick lived in Des Moines, and he rode his bicycle there and back every day, rain, snow, or shine. Later, he was able to find a bus route where he could get off and walk several miles to get home.

But Nick Hansen spent as little time at home as possible. He stayed after school in Kent often, or he went to his friends’ homes to play music. Alan Hall’s, Todd Froy’s, and Jeff Barclay’s parents all welcomed Nick and he often stayed for supper or overnight.

Nick knew that he was something of a disappointment to his father. “He pushed me into playing baseball, but I hated it and I wasn’t any good at sports.”

“It’s kind of difficult to explain our relationships,” Ty says. “Nick went to a different high school than Kandy and I did. He wanted to take advantage of the advanced science, math, and music courses offered there. In a way,
it was always the three of us against my dad—just to survive. But when it came down to it, it was every man for himself. Nick just stayed out of Dad’s way, Kandy Kay was his favorite, and, as I said, I got the brunt of his fists.”

Of them all, Ty, who was not yet two when Joann disappeared, was the “target child.” He was the one who irritated his father more than the other two. Sometimes he and Nick wondered if Bob Hansen really
was
Ty’s biological father because he singled Ty out for the very worst physical punishment. Maybe their mother had been starved enough for love that she had been with another man.

That was really just conjecture because Ty had Bob’s height, his chin, and his physical prowess. And Joann Hansen had been too panicked by her husband to do anything but simply try to survive.

“Dad didn’t like Ty at all,” Nick says. “He wasn’t wanted. I don’t know why.”

One of Bob’s most egregious punishments for Ty happened when he and his children were camping on the shore of Banks Lake.

“Maybe Ty didn’t tell you about this,” Nick suggests. “It was so awful I don’t think he chooses to remember it.”

Banks Lake is a twenty-seven-mile-long manmade reservoir with clear blue water, formed by the north dam near Grand Coulee and the Dry Falls Dam near Coulee City, and filled with water from Lake Roosevelt. Surrounded by rocky outcroppings—basalt cliffs and talus slopes—the land around Banks Lake looks like it belongs on another planet, or in a desert. It is a draw for vacationers and tourists, an unexpected oasis.