Don't Look Behind You

by Ann Rule

  Privately, LaVonne felt, “He was the poorest excuse for a human being I ever knew!”

  Bob Hansen was a fishing and hunting fanatic. Blood sports. He often returned from his hunting trips on the eastern side of the Cascade Mountains with the still-bleeding bodies of the animals he’d shot roped to his truck fenders.

  Everything living was eventually lined up in Bob’s gun sights. His photo albums include scores of shots of Bob Hansen and the things he killed: deer, wolves, elk, bald eagles, strings of mammoth fish.

  One time, Bob organized a hunting trip to Montana with nine of the men he knew, including Marv Milosevich.

  “We went to the Silver Creek Campground,” Milosevich recalls, “and the fishing was great, but after five days, I think every guy there hated him. Bob had to control everything! He planned the menus, cooked the food, or told the guy cooking how to do it, decided when we’d eat, when and where we would fish—everything!”

  None of the nine—except for Marv—ever fished with Bob Hansen again.

  “I went fishing with him but I had to keep him at arm’s length,” Marv said with a grin. “I insisted on taking two boats. We’d keep in touch by radio or walkie-talkies, but we weren’t on the same boat.”

  Hansen never questioned why the man he considered to be his best friend wouldn’t spend even a few hours alone with him. Marv had had enough of Bob’s controlling nature, but he still liked Bob and felt obligated to him.

  Chapter Four

  A SMALL-TOWN MYSTERY

  It’s very difficult for me to believe that even though we lived in the same town, it took decades before I learned about Joann Hansen’s disappearance. And then suddenly information about her vanishing seemed to come at me from every direction during the same time period.

  I was approached by both Ty Hansen, Joann’s youngest son, and Kathleen Huget. They didn’t know each other—they had never even met. I didn’t know that Ty had gone to school with my older son, Andy, and had played baseball with him. Nor did I know that my other children had been acquainted with the three Hansen children.

  By the time I finally heard of the tragedy, which had occurred the year before we moved to Des Moines, almost five decades had passed. I found myself feeling guilty and regretful that I hadn’t been aware of it. With my background as a police officer and a welfare caseworker, I know I would have found some way to help Joann’s children. Our lives crisscrossed so often in the intervening years that it seems impossible I didn’t know them.

  In the early 1940s, my in-laws purchased a beach shack in Des Moines for $700. When they retired to Southern California in 1963, my then-husband, Bill Rule, wanted to go back to the small town where he grew up. Even though that little structure had been remodeled over the years, our house wasn’t exactly weatherproof. It was the first solid object windstorms blowing northeast over Puget Sound would hit. The walls were still stuffed with old newspapers for insulation, and in the winter the wind blew through a hundred cracks, making the windows facing the sound rattle. Indeed, there were even a few times when the single-pane glass blew out and our whole living room was left in shambles.

  When Bill and I and our three older children moved in, I was pregnant with my youngest son, Mike. It was summer and we all loved to roam the beach below the sandbank and across the street from our house.

  Des Moines had only 4,500 residents in 1963; the beach, a Covenant Church camp, and a number of church-sponsored retirement homes were the main attractions. Main Street was about four blocks long, with a supermarket on either end and a friendly, small grocery store in between. It was to be expected that we soon knew many of the people who lived in Des Moines, and most of the mysteries, folklore, ghosts, and unexplained happenings in town.

  And there were many.

  Sixth Avenue was haunted. It may still be, for all I know. Through the years, tragedy stalked the residents of Sixth Avenue. At the north end of the street, a hundred years ago, a minister named Daddy Draper once oversaw an orphanage in an aged structure. Its paint had long since worn off. Over the years, a number of motley tenants moved in and out of the building. Moving toward the south end, almost every home had suffered a tragedy. Old-timers could list more than a dozen heartrending events.

  There was one home where my daughter Leslie wouldn’t babysit after her first night there. When the sun went down, anyone in the house—including myself—could hear what clearly seemed to be the anguished sound of a woman weeping, her cries spreading outside farther and farther the darker it got. More than that, unseen hands seemed to push the mantel away from the fireplace in the home. Our dogs refused to go in the crawl space beneath the house, and, oddly, we heard glass jars rolling down there—even when there was no room for that to happen.

  Across the street, a psychotic son—whose “episodes” invariably happened during the winter holidays—killed his mother and then cut her head off before setting fire to their house; the daughter of the family next door was shot and left a quadriplegic; another family close by had been in a horrible accident that killed their teenage son and crippled them; and one could only guess at some of the tragedies that had brought orphans to Daddy Draper’s.

  The odd couple who lived in a ramshackle house on the corner next to where the weeping woman cried kept old Christmas trees and a dead dog on their front porch. And when they shopped at one of the supermarkets, they literally had a layer of dust on them—even on their hair and clothing. All of us gave them a wide berth in the checkout line.

  There were true stories of several people who had drowned in the sound at the southern end of Sixth, including a scrawny fisherman who gave a ride in his rowboat to an immensely fat woman. Her weight caused the boat to tip. While her fat insulated her from the cold waters, he perished from hypothermia. She caught pneumonia but she survived.

  Below our house, Cliff Avenue, on the edge of the sound, had been the burial ground for Native Americans in the nineteenth century, along with their canoes, intricately woven baskets, blue beads, and other treasures. A lot of people believed that they, too, haunted Des Moines after their graves were disturbed. (My former father-in-law, the Methodist preacher’s son, was one of the bad boys who saved souvenirs. As an adult, he gave them to the Museum of History and Industry in Seattle.)

  Now Des Moines has dozens of expensive condos along the beach, and I doubt that new residents have any idea about the old folktales.

  Near where Joann and Bob Hansen lived in their first home—on Eighth Street two blocks east—there was a fatal fire on Christmas Eve, and a triple murder, each of them on a separate Christmas.

  One had to be a student of local history and immensely curious—as I was, and am—to know of all these events. But, as much as I search my memory, to the best of my knowledge I never met either Bob or Joann Hansen, although I’m sure we must have passed each other in the supermarkets, at Little League games, or at school events.

  And despite my interest in local history, I had never heard of their story until Kathleen Huget and Ty Hansen contacted me within weeks of each other. And independently, some of Ty’s friends also got in touch with me. This was in the late summer of 2010, and what they wanted to tell me about had happened forty-eight years earlier!

  As a stack of albums, legal papers, narratives written by friends, and newspaper clippings were delivered to me, I was startled to see school photos identical to some I have saved in my children’s scrapbooks. In one photo of Mrs. Rilda Moses’s private kindergarten, my younger daughter, Leslie, is sitting in the front row, wearing the red corduroy and paper-doll patterned dress I sewed for her back when we were poor and couldn’t afford to shop at department stores.

  I recognized several of her friends in the 1964 group photo, but Joann and Bob Hansen’s first child, Nick, was in the back row; I never knew Nick.

  Chapter Five

  A DOOMED MARRIAGE

  Joann gave birth to Nick Hansen at Auburn General Hospital on November 7, 1957. He weighed six pounds, ten and a half ounces, a
nd he had dark hair like his mother. Someone pasted the hospital card that identified his bassinet in the newborn ward into the same album with his father’s earliest photographs. It was probably Joann; she loved being a mother, and she adored Nick as she did her older son, Bobby.

  If Joann had any reason to regret her relationship with Bob Hansen, there was no way she could change the direction her life was headed. For three years in a row, like clockwork, she became pregnant each February. She had her daughter, Kandy Kay, in November 1958, and her youngest son, Ty, in November 1959.

  She loved her children and she gloried in being a mother. But by this time if Joann Hansen could have escaped from her marriage, she would have. Things that happened behind the walls of her home were sometimes so awful that she didn’t tell even Patricia Martin. But when the burden got too frightening, she confided in Pat, and her best friend had a horrifying glimpse of the invisible prison Joann lived in.

  Of course Joann had brought her first son, Bobby Morrison, with her when she married Bob Hansen. She had hoped that they would make a happy blended family. But her hopes evaporated one day when she and Bob went shopping for groceries. Bobby was somewhere between six and seven then, and he pointed to some bottles of pop—cream soda—and asked Bob to buy them.

  “What’s the name of those?” Bob asked the little boy repeatedly.

  Bobby couldn’t read yet, and he had no idea what the brand and the name of the pop were. He cringed as Bob asked him over and over. He didn’t know why that made his stepfather so angry.

  “When they got home,” Patricia Martin remembers, tears filling her eyes, “Bob took that child down to the basement and he beat him black and blue—just because he couldn’t say the brand of the soda pop he wanted.

  “Joann phoned me and asked me to be sure no one was at my house because she needed to come over, and she didn’t want anyone to see what had happened. I was there alone when she drove up with Bobby. He was only six years old, and he was so badly injured that she had to carry him in. Naturally, I said he could stay with us.

  “I wanted so much to raise Bobby. After what Bob Hansen did to him, he couldn’t go back to that house.

  “Joann was pregnant again, and she didn’t know what to do. I kept Bobby at my house for two months, but finally, his own father—Walt Morrison—wanted custody of him, and we had to let him go. Of all Joann’s kids, I sometimes think that Bobby was damaged the most, and that’s saying a lot. Joann grieved over that terribly, but she felt that she had no other choice.”

  It hadn’t taken very long before Joann Hansen realized that Bob Hansen was a cruel, controlling man. He was just plain mean, and he viewed her as a possession—not as an equal partner. With her children as hostages, she was afraid to leave Bob. She had no income of her own and she didn’t know how she could take care of them, or if he would even let her go.

  In his odd bullying way, Bob Hansen seemed to care for their three children. She didn’t think he would hurt them physically, but she was sure he wouldn’t let her take them with her if she left.

  Bob had no such compunction about hurting Joann. She was a battered wife long before victims felt they could speak out about what was happening inside their homes. Bob was smart enough to hit her where it didn’t show—on her belly, her legs, her breasts. And it didn’t matter if she was pregnant or not. It was a miracle that she didn’t miscarry any of her pregnancies.

  The obstetrician who had delivered her children, Dr. Fred Hahn, was horrified when he saw her breasts were so bruised that they were black, and he took photographs of her injuries. Joann’s beatings were not isolated events; she almost always had a bruise someplace on her body, but Bob was careful where he hit her and her clothes covered most of her injuries.

  Joann could never be sure what would make Bob angry, so she tiptoed around trying to sense what he would do if she said the wrong thing. He had a hair-trigger temper and he could explode without any warning.

  “As I said,” Patricia Martin began, “Joann and I had both worked for the telephone company, and once we were invited to a company dance—with our husbands, of course. It was a chance for Joann to go out for a change, and Bob said he would go along. She wasn’t allowed to spend any money without asking him, but this one time before the dance, she and I were walking along in downtown Auburn and we saw these feathered earrings in a store window. They were very popular at the time. Joann had a red sequined dress she was going to wear to the dance, and there were these great red feather earrings. I bought black ones to match my dress, and I told Joann she should get the red ones. She said she didn’t dare—so I told her to buy them, and we’d say that I bought them for her.”

  Pat remembers that Joann was so beautiful and sexy that it didn’t really matter what she wore, but, given a choice, Joann almost always chose red.

  “She walked like a model—she practiced with books between her thighs so she just glided instead of walking.”

  Bob and Joann had Pat and her husband, Louie, and another couple over for drinks before the dance that night. Joann was getting ready when they arrived. In a few minutes, she walked into the living room. She was a knockout in her red sequined dress, and everything seemed to go smoothly until Bob noticed the red feather earrings and asked her where she got them.

  “Joann said, ‘Pat bought them for me,’ but he’d already found the sales slip,” Pat recalls. “He called her into the bedroom, and we could hear him knocking her into the walls. We could hear Joann saying, ‘No … please, no!’ To this day, I don’t know why none of us said anything or tried to stop him. I guess we were afraid of embarrassing Joann. And then—in those days—people, especially men, didn’t interfere with other people’s marriages.

  “And to tell the truth, everyone was afraid of Bob Hansen.”

  After a while, Bob came out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.

  “Joann decided not to go tonight,” he said almost smugly.

  When Pat saw Joann the next day, her face was purpled and puffy with bruises.

  Bob was pathologically jealous, although it was doubtful that he had any reason to be. Joann had dated a lot of men when she was single, but she’d been really happy when she first settled down with Bob. She welcomed a secure relationship or, rather, what she believed would be a secure marriage. Beyond that, since she was pregnant for three straight years, with three small children to care for, she wouldn’t have been able to cheat on Bob—even if she’d wanted to.

  Her strongest reason not to stray, however, was that, all too soon, she was scared to death of him.

  The Hansens’ children were also terrified of Bob. As they grew, they learned that their father’s moods could be unpredictable and often violent. They used to line up on the brown couch beneath a picture window in the new house Bob built and watch for his truck at the end of the day. It wasn’t because they were happy to have their daddy come home; it was because they were afraid.

  Like their mother, they were never quite sure what might set him off. He beat them regularly; his punishments were more than spankings. Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were so small, and he was a very large, powerful man.

  Patricia Martin knew better than to visit Joann when Bob was home, but they managed to get together on afternoons when they knew he was far away on a construction job. One day Pat’s son and Joann’s oldest son, Bobby Morrison, were wrestling around and accidentally knocked over the Christmas tree.

  “We all panicked,” Pat remembers, “but somehow we got it back up and the ornaments on the tree just before Bob came home. He never knew about it.”

  Bob always wanted to have a big Christmas. He had his camera handy, and he took photos of everyone opening presents and of the many decorations Joann had put up. Her parents and sisters weren’t invited, however. Bob didn’t care for them, and he frowned whenever Joann wanted to visit with them. It is a classic ploy for abusive husbands and boyfriends: separate the women from their families and friends so they will have no one to run to.

>   There were so many times when Bob humiliated Joann.

  On a rare occasion, Pat and her husband, Louie, who was a police officer in Auburn, Washington, joined a group of people that included Bob and Joann for a night of dancing.

  The Spanish Castle, a dance hall that dated back to the twenties, stood on the corner of Pacific Highway South—“Old 99”—and the busy Kent Des Moines Road. The dusty yellow stucco structure was long past its glory days when big name bands played there, but it still featured local bands that drew crowds. It was only three miles or so from the brown house where Joann and Bob lived.

  The group was having a good time on that Saturday night until Joann apparently said or did something that made Bob mad.

  “He knocked her right out of her chair, onto the floor,” Pat says. “She was hurt and very embarrassed. People stared for a couple of minutes, and then they went back to drinking and dancing.”

  Nobody reported it to the police.

  Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine that women were considered chattel by some men then—that they could be savagely abused in front of witnesses and no one interfered. But the term “battered woman” had yet to be coined. Women were humiliated and—more often than not—afraid to come forward; the majority of wives didn’t work and were dependent on their husbands financially.

  Certainly, there are legions of abused women today but at least there are safe places and support groups where they can run if they have the courage to leave.

  Joann Hansen had few options.

  She was an immaculate housekeeper and a good cook who kept within the budget Bob allowed for groceries. But their house on the road to Saltwater State Park in Des Moines wasn’t homey. The wood floors were dark; Bob liked the brown furniture, his trophies of dead animals mounted on the walls, and his cabinets filled with guns.