Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (27 page)

The prom dinner was an embarrassment and a disappointment for the girls, who were dressed in lovely gowns, with the matching corsages their dates had given them. This was supposed to be a time for teenagers, and Kandy Kay’s father didn’t fit in at all. It was almost as if he was usurping a special, memory-making evening that belonged to
them.

Whether Bob Hansen knew beforehand that the drive-in was showing a pornographic movie—however soft- or hard-core it might be—or if it was a surprise for him, he quickly called the boys over to the window and pointed out what was on the screen.

“It was kind of like when he took us to the circus,” Barbara remembers. “We were all humiliated, and it ruined our evening. The guys were glued to that window, we girls ate dinner alone, and we were really late for the prom. It seemed like Bob had planned it.”

Kandy worked from the time she was old enough to get a job—first at Baskin-Robbins selling ice cream, and then at the Sears Outlet store. But she had had to grow up too fast, without anyone to guide her. In many ways, she seemed far older than she really was.

Saltwater State Park on Puget Sound is about five miles south of Des Moines. A very handsome—and very
married—ranger worked there, and Kandy had a huge crush on him. He was at least seven years older than she was—a long stretch when she was seventeen. It was easy for him to seduce her, and they began an intense affair.

“He drove us wherever we wanted to go,” Barb Snyder says. “He seemed as though he wasn’t married, but both of us knew he was. Kandy wouldn’t listen to good sense when I tried to warn her. She was madly in love with him.”

When they were seniors at Mount Rainier High School, Barb decided to run for Miss Des Moines of 1977, a precursor to the Miss Washington pageant. The first prize was a $700 scholarship, and Barb urged Kandy to enter, too. It was something they could enjoy together as best friends, and she thought it might help Kandy turn her life around. At first, Kandy wasn’t interested, but Barb kept plugging away and finally convinced her.

But Barb’s plan backfired.

“Once she decided to enter, she
really
wanted to win—even at the cost of our friendship,” Barb Kuehne Snyder remembers.

Bob Hansen was all for it. It was one more opportunity to show off his family—especially his daughter. He paid for Kandy’s preparation for the pageant. He saw to it that she had the most expensive dress, the best pageant coach, the most talented beautician.

Like all fledgling beauty queens, the Miss Des Moines hopefuls attended breakfasts, lunches, teas, charity events, parades, and anything else that local boosters could come up with. The contenders got little sleep, but it was all so heady and exciting that they didn’t mind.

The Des Moines Junior Chamber of Commerce sponsored Kandy, and the Wind Drift Restaurant sponsored Barbara. They both were chosen among the twelve finalists.

Kandy Kay Hansen won. It was a serious coup d’état for Bob. Wearing a white tuxedo, he stood proudly next to his daughter while photographers took their picture, knowing that they would be on the front page of the local weekly, the
Des Moines News
.

Bob Hansen had traveled far from the boy who had to wear manure-stained pants to school. He didn’t give a second thought to whoever had fallen in his path along the way. Bob never had pangs of conscience that anyone could see.

Kandy was soon caught up in the whirl of the Miss Washington competition. Preparing for the state pageant on June 22 to 24, 1978, she had handlers and chaperones and they watched her closely. She had never had chaperones before but she did what they told her to do. She stayed away from her married lover, alcohol, and marijuana. For a time, she almost had mother figures, although it was far too late by then.

If she could only win Miss Washington, Kandy would be on her way to Atlantic City and the Miss America pageant in September. She was pretty enough and she certainly had talent enough to win, and her father was pushing hard and spending freely to help her surpass all the other young women.

“She wanted to be Miss Washington
so much
,” Barbara says. “It meant everything to her.”

In the end, Kandy Kay Hansen came in as third runner-up to Miss Washington. It was difficult to tell who was
more disappointed, Kandy or Bob. She was his shining star and she had failed him. He let her know that, seeing, as always, only his own side of it.

With her dream lost, Kandy Hansen changed. She would be twenty in four months, and it seemed that she had aimed for—and failed to achieve—the most important goal she would ever have. She didn’t want to go to college, and she didn’t want to take another boring job. She was depressed, and the future seemed to hold no hope for her.

It was 1978, and it wasn’t long before Kandy was back with the park ranger, back on marijuana, and probably on stronger drugs. She dated several men. Barbara saw the bruises and the cuts on Kandy’s lips; her lovers were abusers—just like her father had been with her mother.

Kandy grew skilled at applying makeup to cover her battle scars, but it broke Barbara Kuehne’s heart to see how men had physically hurt her. Their paths were diverging as Kandy and Barbara’s lifestyles were no longer in sync. Barb wanted to have a husband and a family, and Kandy wasn’t sure what she wanted. As much as they tried to pretend things were still the same between them, they both knew they weren’t.

Barb Kuehne wasn’t the only one who was angry at men who hurt Kandy. There was one man Kandy tried in vain to break up with; he wouldn’t let her go and he trailed her everywhere she went. She finally told her father that she was afraid of what the guy might do to her.

Bob laughed later when he told his friend Marv Milosevich that he had instructed Kandy to invite the stalker
into her apartment, and told her that he would handle things from there.

Kandy did let the obsessive ex-boyfriend into her apartment. When the unwanted suitor walked into the dark apartment, Bob was waiting—with an iron plumbing pipe. He swung it as hard as he could against the man’s head.

“What happened to him?” Marv asked.

“Let’s just say that she won’t have to worry about him ever again,” Bob said grimly.

He wouldn’t reveal whether the man was dead or alive, but Marv suspected the former.

Barb was engaged to be married a year or so after graduation, and she asked Kandy to be her maid of honor.

“She said she would,” Barb remembers, “but she couldn’t seem to get it together enough to order her gown, or try it on. She always had something else to do, or I couldn’t find her. In the end, I knew I had to leave her out of my wedding.”

But Kandy did come to her longtime best friend’s wedding.

“She came with the park ranger, even though he was still married,” Barbara remembers sadly. “She was making bad choices.”

Bob soon moved Kandy into one of the other houses he owned in Des Moines. It was only a few blocks north of the brown house behind the Willows. It was, in fact, the house he and Joann had lived in when they were first married. One or another member of his family lived in it over the years when Bob didn’t have it rented out.

Kandy was not quite twenty when she began dancing in the disco night spots that popped up close to the highway and army and air force bases around Seattle and Tacoma. She hadn’t gone to college and she was bored and sick of jobs in fast-food restaurants. She was, of course, very beautiful and a natural as a cocktail waitress and then as a scantily clad dancer.

She was dancing in Tacoma when she was attracted to a new man. He was a bad boy and exciting. His name was Ron Wakefield. Kandy married him.

Wakefield introduced Kandy to heroin.

“He was charming and good-looking,” her brother Ty says. “But he was a junkie. Once Kandy hooked up with him, she went down fast. He dragged her down with him. They were both just junkies looking for heroin wherever they could find it.”

Barbara, too, saw that Kandy’s drug use had escalated, and Barb feared she was almost certainly using heroin. She also knew that Kandy was making her living as a topless dancer and sometimes stripping entirely. She even heard rumors that Kandy was working for an escort service.

“One of the last times I saw her,” Barbara Kuehne Snyder remembers, “it may have been the very last time—this was in the eighties, and we were in our early twenties. I went over to her house to see her. She excused herself and came back with a syringe and some heroin. I couldn’t stand to see that, and I told her so, but she didn’t stop. I had to leave.”

Shortly after that, Kandy and Ron Wakefield were in trouble for some kind of incident in a state liquor store.
Ty thinks Ron robbed it. Her brothers were never sure just what happened, but they believed that it was Wakefield who pulled it off and that he somehow involved Kandy.

“At any rate,” Ty says, “they left town in a hurry, and on the run. They planned to head south and then drive cross-country.”

They were in Wendover, Utah, when their car broke down.

Wendover sits on the Utah-Nevada border and each state claims half the city. It is a gambler’s paradise.

“The cops stopped to help them when they spotted Ron’s car beside the road,” Ty continues. “They checked on Ron and found he had a warrant out of Washington for his arrest, so they handcuffed him and took him away in the back of their squad car.

“Kandy was left alone in the broken-down car, strung out and broke. She hitched a ride into town and managed to get a job as a cocktail waitress in a casino there.”

Tom Yarbrough was the manager of the casino, and he was also the “go-to man” in Wendover. He had numerous friends and a reputation as a good guy. Tom was much older than Kandy—close to her father’s age, near sixty—but he was quite handsome; he looked very much like the actor Omar Sharif.

Yarbrough noticed Kandy in the casino and they began talking, then dating. It was probably the first time in her life when a man had unselfishly wanted to do what was best for Kandy Hansen. Tom truly cared for her. She was only twenty-five, and still had a chance to change her life.

In time, Kandy moved in with Tom. With his help, she managed to get completely off drugs. Although it was a painful struggle, Kandy escaped her terrifying addiction to heroin. She was the picture of health in photographs taken of the couple at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. They looked like two movie stars. Kandy wore a one-shouldered black sequined dress, and Tom was dressed in a white suit, wine-colored shirt, white satin tie, and a chunky gold bracelet.

“Tom was a prince,” Ty Hansen declares. “He was a good influence on Kandy. He wanted to marry her; he even asked my dad for permission to marry her, and my father saw that she was clean and happy, and he said yes. But they never did get married.”

Ty Hansen had suffered the most physical abuse over the years, and he had the scars to prove it. From the time he and Nick were in first or second grade, they started working with Bob Hansen on his construction jobs. One of their jobs was picking up endpieces of wood and debris around the construction sites.

Marv Milosevich thought Bob was too hard on the boys. “They were just little kids, and they would play with the scrap wood—making cars and boats. That made Bob angry.

“He had different kinds of punishment for them. If he thought Nick and Ty were deliberately sloughing off when they should be working, he would get out his hatchet. Then he made them put their hands flat on a stump, and he’d raise the hatchet. He’d stop just before he hit them,
but they were scared to death. So was I—afraid he would miss and actually cut a hand or some fingers off.”

Milosevich also saw Bob discipline the boys at home. If they watched too much television, or it was something he didn’t want to watch, he simply cut the power cords in two, and the screen went black.

One positive thing Ty says about his father is that Bob Hansen was an honest businessman. “He never cheated anyone, he built good houses and buildings, and he didn’t cut corners.”

Nick agrees. Whatever his father might have kept hidden, or however cruel he could be, Nick, too, says Bob Hansen delivered solid buildings for a fair price.

It’s interesting—but sad—that both of his sons tried for a long time to please him, to somehow have a father who was proud of them, even though he took “tough love” to extremes. Eventually, they realized there
was
no pleasing Bob Hansen.

Until they finally walked away from him, they kept trying.

There was the summer of 1980 when Bob spent three months with Nick building a house in Westport, Washington. It was a plain one-story house that was more a cabin than a house with frills—but it was solid. Bob wanted it for himself—so he would have his own place at the ocean.

He and Nick had time to fish while they were building the cabin. Westport, in Grays Harbor County, is one of Washington State’s top harbors for deep-sea fishermen.

“It wasn’t a bad summer,” Nick remembers, “and I learned a lot about building—but I didn’t see my future
there. In the end, my father accepted that I wasn’t cut out to be a blue-collar worker; I was probably more white collar, and he dealt with that.”

Nick Hansen had so much going for him, just as Ty and Kandy Kay did. All of them were very intelligent and physically attractive. They were fairly adept at hiding the wounded places inside them. Nick graduated third in his class at Kent-Meridian High School, he was working toward a degree in math at the University of Washington, and his naval career drew many accolades. He was a handsome young man, and he had a pretty blond girlfriend, Melissa.

But Nick knew he was living a lie. And it ate at him like acid.

Still, there was no one he could talk to, no one to help him sort out his life. From about the age of five, he had more secrets than Bob Hansen or his siblings knew, and he had lived in torment trying to deal with his confusing emotions. His dilemma began—probably more than coincidentally—when his mother vanished. Nick cannot recall a time when he didn’t want to be a girl instead of a boy.

It was a secret he felt he couldn’t reveal to anyone.