Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (29 page)

Ty wasn’t sure what to do next. He managed to contact his brother Nick who was on board the U.S.S.
Enterprise
as part of his navy tour. The
Enterprise
was halfway around the world, and even though the navy was willing
to fly Nick back to Washington State, it would take several days.

Their father was in Costa Rica, as he often was.

“He didn’t come back for weeks,” Ty remembers. “We had Kandy’s services in Kent.”

The brothers had different recollections of the event, not surprisingly, as both were in shock.

Actually, Nick Hansen says he made Kandy’s funeral arrangements. And their father
did
get back to Washington State in time to attend her services, although Nick said Bob already had reservations for that day and made no special effort to rush home.

Neither of his sons recalls Bob showing a great deal of grief during her funeral. Nick, however, went with his father shortly after Kandy’s services to see two of his friends—brothers—who owned a truck stop in Algona, Washington.

“I was shocked to see my dad cry in front of them,” Nick says. “I’d never seen him cry before. I know that Kandy put him through a lot when she was involved in drugs when she was younger. Some of his friends in Kent—where he went to have coffee—had talked to him then about getting her some help, but he didn’t agree with them. I remember one of his closest acquaintances had lost his daughter in an accident. This guy was the mayor of Kent at the time, and he tried to get my dad to do whatever it took to get Kandy off drugs—but my dad said he believed in tough love.”

In Kandy Hansen’s case, toughness wasn’t what was missing in her life. She had needed soft, nurturing love all of her life and rarely found it.

Ty feels that he was the one who missed Kandy the most after she died. They had always been close, about the only family members who were always there for each other. And with Kandy gone, Ty felt all alone.

Ty was doing fairly well painting used cars and repairing rental cars at a garage on Pacific Highway. But an acquaintance talked him into moving on and having his own business at a “great spot” further south that was going to be for rent.

Ty was twenty-six when he got his dealer’s license, and he was selling used cars and making good money when a stranger out of Arizona walked in one day and said he wanted to join Ty as a partner. It sounded promising at first. Phil Hallop* said he would handle the books and come up with all the ads, publicity, and whatever stunts might be needed to bring in customers. And Ty, who had attended community college in a nearby town, taking auto mechanics courses, would be in charge of all the car maintenance and mechanical problems.

One of the Arizona glad-hander’s ideas was to have Ty dress in a white cowboy suit, mask, boots, and ten-gallon hat so prospective buyers would see his resemblance to the Lone Ranger. This wasn’t an original idea with Hallop; he had seen a car lot use it effectively in Phoenix. He figured that he could steal the gimmick since Washington and Arizona were far apart.

So Ty Hansen—not experienced with glib con men—agreed. With his height, he was a natural at portraying an
honest-looking Western hero. His schtick was his nickname: “the Loan Arranger.”

Ty soon became a semicelebrity in the Seattle area, and small children gazed at him in wonder as their parents shopped for an almost-new car or truck.

But Ty got in too deep when he trusted his partner’s handling of the books. He was shocked to find that they didn’t have anywhere near as much in the bank as he’d been led to believe. Within a few months, Ty Hansen’s business was in trouble, and he fired Phil Hallop. A month later, someone broke into the car lot office and stole all of Ty’s files. He realized it was Hallop when he later threatened to blackmail Ty.

“I’d bitten off far more than I could chew,” Ty admits today.

He lost his business license and felt he had little choice but to leave Washington and start over. He moved to California and then Oregon.

In Oregon, Ty soon started seeing a young divorced woman who had a small daughter, Sylvie.* His new family changed his life. They married and soon had another daughter, Brigette.*

Nick was still dating Melissa. He loved her, but he remained torn by his sense that he should have been born a female. Before he asked Melissa to marry him, he knew he had to be totally honest with her.

“I told her everything,” he remembers. “And she accepted me as I was. I married her because she was the only one I’d ever known who gave me unconditional love—who didn’t judge me.”

Ty stood up as best man for his brother, Bob beamed proudly beside them, and Melissa made a lovely bride. Nick isn’t sure what year they got married, but he knows it was in the late eighties or early nineties.

They soon had two daughters—Robyn* and Terri*—and they were both delighted with their girls. Like Ty, Nick adored his daughters.

“But the unconditional love from Melissa didn’t last,” Nick says. “It grew more and more conditional. I think Melissa might have thought I would change, but I couldn’t. Being married didn’t take away my fantasies. Loving my little girls didn’t either. Inside, I still felt like a woman.”

Nick never blamed Melissa, realizing that they each meant their marriage vows at their wedding, but they had both been naive about how they could work out the huge truth that divided them.

They were divorced, but they have remained friends and they share the care of Robyn and Terri.

Ty, too, feels that his marriage was responsible for a positive change in his world, even though they would eventually divorce.

“Brigette and Sylvie saved my life,” Ty says. “They meant so much to me, and so did my wife, Jill.* I got clean and sober for them, and as they grew older, I wanted to tell my daughters about my family. The problem was that I didn’t
know
that much about my family. Uncle Ken and his wife, Lorene, were gone, and I knew nothing about any relatives my mother might have had.”

Ty decided to start with the court records on his parents’ divorce—a divorce then thirty-odd years in the past. Ty himself was about thirty-three when he went to King County to ask about the divorce records.

He was shocked at what he found there. He’d never known about the physical abuse his mother had endured at his father’s hands. But it was easy for Ty to believe—after the bruises, broken bones, and broken teeth he had suffered from Bob’s punishments.

All he’d ever heard was that his mother hadn’t wanted any of her children, that she had simply walked away from them without a backward glance. The woman he was reading about in the dusty divorce file sounded far different from the way his father had always characterized Joann.

The civil deputy at the counter evidently knew about the disappearance of Joann Hansen. He spoke confidentially to Ty.

“He told me that no one had ever found her, but then he said he had always believed my father had murdered my mother.”

That revelation stunned Ty Hansen. He hadn’t realized that many of the old-timers in the sheriff’s department had long felt that his mother was a homicide victim; they just hadn’t had any evidence to go on back in the day when no body meant no murder as far as the law and evidence went.

He knew his mother had vanished in August 1962. Ty wondered how many more people might still be around who would share information with him. Scarcely hoping that he could find his mother’s divorce attorney—Duncan
Bonjorni—Ty thumbed through south King County phone books to see if Bonjorni was listed. Bonjorni might not even be alive, Ty thought, figuring that the attorney would probably be in his late sixties or seventies.

Bonjorni was alive, and quite willing to talk with Ty Hansen.

Ty took his daughter Brigette with him when he went to Bonjorni’s law offices. “She took her first step there,” he remembers. “In the rain at the parking lot, and she was so small. My wife and I were so blown away to see her walk!”

Bonjorni said that of course he remembered Joann Hansen. He had tried to help her, and then one day she had disappeared. Like the records deputy, Bonjorni was convinced that Joann was long dead and that she had been murdered.

He shared everything he knew with Ty.

Ty didn’t know what to do with the information that he had finally stumbled upon; taken by surprise, he needed time to digest what he had learned, and he had no idea where to start looking for his lost mother. Bob Hansen had lived in a lot of places since 1962, and currently he was spending most of his time in Costa Rica. Ty doubted that his father would tell him anything about his mother even if he traveled to Costa Rica to confront him.

The barn in Kent near the Green River was gone, torn down when the road was changed, a road that now paved over where the white barn had once sat. But the Valley Apartments were still there.

Ty wondered if his dad might have buried his mother under the floors of the buildings Bob owned when she was
last seen in 1962. Ty knew that Bob Hansen had cemented over part of the dirt floor in the barn not long after Joann had disappeared.

Had she lain undiscovered, deep in the ground that was now under a road?

That seemed unlikely at first; there were hundreds of places to hide a body around Washington State that were virtual wildernesses—impenetrable forests, deep lakes, and sere, sun-baked hills in eastern Washington. There was Puget Sound, just a block away from the last house Joann had lived in, that eventually emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Bob Hansen was familiar with the whole state of Washington. And he’d always had boats, boats seaworthy enough to traverse rough waters and tides in the Pacific Ocean.

“He could have hidden her body in many places. I left it alone for ten years,” Ty remembers today. “I don’t know why it took so long. Other things got in the way, but the mystery of my mother haunted me, popping up when I didn’t expect it. I knew that one day I would have to face it head-on.”

The millennium was approaching, and the last decade of the twentieth century was to bring more changes than anyone close to the Hansens’ chaotic family could foresee.

Ty Hansen was in his forties when he told his old friend Cindy Tyler what he had learned about his parents’ marriage and divorce: that several people he’d talked to believed Bob Hansen had killed his wife. Ty was ready to
avenge his mother—if he could. Cindy was both horrified and captivated by this information.

“I had some free time,” Cindy explained. “I decided that I would work with Ty to find the truth, and I told him, ‘You know what, Ty? I’m gonna help you.’ We didn’t have much money; we sure couldn’t afford to dig deep into places where Joann might be, but we hoped we could convince the county to help us.”

Cindy agreed that there were so many aspects of Ty’s mother’s disappearance that hadn’t been checked.

“Even though she had been gone for more than thirty years, I believed we could still find something.”

The two old school friends made a good match; every time either one of them got discouraged about their seemingly futile search for Joann Hansen, the other was able to drum up enthusiasm. Cindy was more outgoing; she usually made the best cheerleader, and she was always able to get Ty to believe that they would find an answer—some day, some way.

Given that many
people who knew Bob Hansen through the years believed he had killed his first wife and gotten away with it, I wanted to be sure that Cecilia Hansen—his second wife—was alive and well. He must have been very angry when he realized that she wanted a divorce. She had been such a sweet and docile twenty-year-old woman when they met, and he had taken her to so many wonderful places.

Cecilia is alive, living in Costa Rica.

There was a second Cecilia, and they may or may not have been married. She abandoned Bob Hansen as soon as she got her green card. She, too, is living—in the United States—but, quite understandably, she doesn’t want to discuss her brief relationship with Bob Hansen.

Although he was chagrined at how the two Cecilias had turned out, Bob was still entranced by Costa Rica. He wanted to settle there, and he kept his eye out for property to buy. In 1997, he also started sending checks and money
orders to officials who he was told would make it easier for him to immigrate.

They accepted his money eagerly.

Bob was secretive about his Costa Rican connections. His old friend Marv Milosevich and his wife, LaVonne, suspect that Bob may have been married several times without announcing it. One photograph, with no notations on the back, may support that theory. Bob and an attractive American woman are standing together in front of an altar. She has an orchid corsage, and it certainly looks like a wedding photo. Who she is—or was—no one knows.

Bob approached several “possibles” in Costa Rica for his next bride. He took one young woman on a long hike, but he came back alone. Asked where his companion was, he explained, “She just went walking off and left me behind.” Bob, however, was carrying the girl’s backpack with all of her most valuable possessions.

The “disappearing” girl drew the attention of Costa Rican police, and they noted Bob as a possible suspect if she should have met with foul play. But despite the fact that the young woman was still missing, Bob wasn’t arrested or charged with anything.

In about 1998, Bob met a beautiful girl named Flory Maria Villalobos-Perez in Costa Rica. She looked a great deal like the first Cecilia. The only bona fide way to tell them apart in photographs is to read the dates in Bob’s scrawled writing.

Flory’s birthday was June 27, 1974. That made her exactly—minus four months—fifty years younger than Bob Hansen. He was seventy-four, and Flory was twenty-four.

He found a way to win Flory’s heart. When he saw that her parents were living in a broken-down house where a plague of bees had built hives, a home with few creature comforts, he offered to build them a new house.

He was still a skilled carpenter and soon finished a solid, weatherproof/bee-proof house. He was a hero to Flory’s family, and she felt she owed him a great deal for being so generous with her parents.