by Ann Rule
Although Jim Allen found nothing definite that might tend to incriminate Bob Hansen in the string of serial murders, his home’s location on Green River Road and his apparent taste for young prostitutes still made him a suspect.
For Frank Adamson and other investigators, Bob Hansen seemed to be a strong “person of interest.” Then FBI profiler John Douglas and psychologist John Kelly from New Jersey—both of whom were often dead-on in their profiles of suspects—disagreed, and Hansen slipped toward the bottom of their “persons of interest” lists.
Dr. Kelly wrote of Hansen: “A wealthy and eccentric farmer … I believe him to have been a lonely, elderly man who wanted a woman to live with him and take care of him. He even advertised for such a woman. His house was important to him; he felt secure behind the heavy wooden door. I believe his house was much more important to him than the river or the woods. He was too conservative and concerned about his wealth and success, and would not endanger that by being in the river or woods with corpses or transporting them long distances. If he was the ‘River Killer,’ that girl would never have escaped from his house.”
In some areas, Kelly was right about Bob Hansen. In others, he was very wrong. Bob knew the woods, rivers, lakes, and wilderness extremely well and had spent much of his life enjoying the outdoors as he fished, hunted, and camped out. He was not housebound in the least.
Had the psychologist known about the “elderly man’s” long missing wife or the girl who never came back from a hike with Bob in Costa Rica, Kelly might have rethought his profile.
Bob Hansen wasn’t charged with anything connected to the Green River cases, but he was charged with indecent liberties and unlawful imprisonment for his alleged sexual advances toward the young woman who had answered his ad for a housekeeper. He was booked into the King County jail on August 4, 1984, and his bail was initially set at $25,000. When a records check showed his 1981 arrest for indecent liberties, his bail was raised to $100,000.
There is, however, no record that he was convicted of his second sexual crime. Bob could handle his bail easily, and he could afford the best defense attorneys.
One thing about the search warrant of his barn concerned Bob Hansen. He’d had a wig and some kind of costume, Marv Milosevich recalled, and the investigators took that, along with his collection of knives. The disguise in the barn could have been a Halloween costume or it might have been used for something more sinister.
Bob told Marv that he had kept $5,000 in cash under the rim of a sink, and the sheriff’s men hadn’t taken that. “I don’t think they knew it was there,” he said to his old friend.
“Don’t fool yourself,” Marv said. “They knew it was there—they weren’t looking for money.”
A few days later, Bob came out to Marv’s place in the country. He had $10,000 in a mason jar that was wrapped in rubber bands. He wanted Marv to keep it for him—just in case he needed emergency money. Marv wasn’t sure where he should put it, and he really didn’t want that much cash secreted on his property.
But Bob insisted, and he dug a hole on the edge of LaVonne’s flower garden and put the mason jar in it. He left, sure that his emergency money was secure.
“It wasn’t a very safe hiding place,” Marv said with a laugh. “My Labrador found it the first day and dug it up! I made Bob take it home and hide it at his place.”
Bob Hansen’s life had taken a downturn, and the older he got, the more paranoid he became. He begged Marv Milosevich to be the executor of his will. He wanted to be sure that none of his children or their children inherited any of his assets—money or property.
“They sent me pictures of their kids,” he told the man he considered his best friend. “But I sent them back, unopened. I don’t want to know anything about them.”
That was hard for Marv to understand; his living room was full of photographs and mementoes of his children and grandchildren as well as friends who were as close as relatives.
Basically, Bob Hansen had always been something of a loner, and now he was isolating himself even more, building walls that grew higher and higher. He didn’t need or want his two sons or their offspring. As far as he was concerned, his children had betrayed him. He would find friends in Costa Rica, he assured Marv.
It was true that Bob Hansen had often advertised for “housekeepers” when he was in between wives and/or girlfriends from Costa Rica. Living all alone, he was still seeking housekeepers as he passed eighty.
His son Ty had described Bob as “a terrible cook,” and he hadn’t improved over the years. He kept a folder titled “Things to Do,” and in April 2006 he wrote out a recipe for soup inside.
Garlic—1 whole clove
Onions—15 large yellow
Cabbage—2 heads
Carrots—4 packages
Celery—2 stalks
Chilis—5 (2 green and 3 red)
Culantro [sic]—2 bunches
Green onions—2
String beans—12 cans
Peas—1 large package frozen
Bob Hansen’s recipe would have made an extremely large vat of soup. Life sustaining, perhaps, but hardly tasty. He did need a woman’s touch in his kitchen, and for “companionship.”
In 2009, Kathleen Huget found a copy of his most recent ad, along with a stack of mimeographed “applications” in his house.
His ad appeared on September 17, 2008, in the Domestic Care and Services sections of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s south county editions:
Auburn resident looking for live-in housekeeper. Female preferred. Light housekeeping, companionship, light cooking, shopping etc. Room and board + wages. Salary negotiable. Call 555-1234.
About half of Hansen’s questions ignored equal rights edicts. He asked women who answered his ads to fill out his applications; they had to give their ages, their heights and weights, whether they had a husband or a boyfriend, if they smoked, used drugs, or drank. And he insisted that they respond to many more highly personal questions that were none of his business.
After he interviewed prospects for someone who would clean his house, cook for him, and be a companion, he scrawled his opinions in the margins of the applications. It was clear he wanted a housekeeper “with benefits.”
Hansen’s comments showed that. He was very picky and wrote “too fat,” “too old,” “too young, “has a boyfriend,” and sometimes “too ugly.”
Few women met his standards, and those whom he grudgingly hired didn’t stay long.
For most of his life, Bob Hansen had exerted control, power, over almost everyone he came into contact with. He was essentially a heartless man who laughed at people who gave to charities or were concerned about others who could do nothing for them in return.
A psychiatrist probably would have diagnosed him as a person who, deep inside, had no sense of control, a man who had to micromanage everyone and everything to stave off panic.
Perhaps.
Flory, Hansen’s third or fourth wife, was a devout Catholic who was often horrified by the way he treated other people. She asked him once: “Aren’t you ever afraid of God’s wrath?”
Bob was cruelly patronizing when he answered: “Flory, don’t you understand? I am God …”
That had frightened her—for Bob’s soul. He was asking to be struck down. She half-expected a bolt of lightning and a thunderclap from the sky. But nothing happened. He kept on living a hedonistic, controlling life.
Eventually, sometime early in the new century, Flory was able to find her way back to Costa Rica. She had paid dearly for her parents’ house; she could no longer live like a butterfly in a cage, trying to deal with Bob Hansen’s temper and blasphemy.
But there were so many more young women waiting in Costa Rica; when Bob started his new life there, he was sure he would have his pick.
His newly purchased condo in Costa Rica was lavish for that country, and he memorialized every room and all of its luxuriant details and features with his ever-present camera.
Loc
ated across the street from a park, the building was modern and Bob had selected comparatively expensive furnishings and paintings for every room. He could hardly wait to live there permanently.
The ironic thing about Bob’s snapshots was that they were almost always a bit out of focus. He seemed to be trying to capture “things” and not people. Even Cecilia and Flory were universally posed against tourist attractions or something Bob wanted to brag about.
Chapter Fifteen
LOOKING FOR JOANN
In the early years of the new century, Cindy Tyler and Ty Hansen were still searching avidly for Joann Hansen, missing now for more than forty years. Beginning with Patricia Martin, they talked with everyone and anyone who might have some memory of Joann and what had happened to her. At one point, they hired an investigator to help them canvass possible witnesses to the lives of Bob and Joann back in the fifties and sixties.
“It seemed that each time we talked to someone new,” Ty recalls, “they said the same thing. ‘Wasn’t she murdered and buried under a cement slab by Bob Hansen?’
“At first this response was shocking. But at some point, we were used to hearing the same thing. No one should become used to hearing about his mother being murdered and buried under a slab of cement.”
Even when Cindy Tyler located one of Bob’s attorneys who had retired to Chicago and asked him about his former client, she was shocked by his response.
“Oh—yeah,” the attorney said. “He was the ‘cement man,’ wasn’t he?”
Ty felt a sense of outrage that the mother he couldn’t even remember had been accepted by people living in the south county area as a homicide victim and then quickly forgotten. Had everyone known but no one pursued the mystery of her disappearance when it had happened? Was it a matter of not wanting to be involved?
Well, Pat Martin had gotten involved, and so had Duncan Bonjorni. They were rays of hope and encouragement that someone still cared.
Ty and Cindy had never found a police file that might have existed shortly after Joann disappeared in August 1962. Patricia Martin had tried her best to file missing reports but no one would listen to her then.
They learned that there had been a case file more than forty years earlier, but it had been destroyed. That was a fairly common practice in the days before computers provided incredible amounts of storage space; very old files were shredded to make room for more recent cases.
At one point in 2004 or 2005 when Ty was in California, Cindy, hoping for clues—or even daring to hope Bob might confess to her—gathered her courage and knocked on Bob Hansen’s door. No one answered, and she knocked again. She was just about to leave when the door swung open and she saw Bob towering over her.
“He let me in,” she said, still surprised that he had. “I stayed almost an hour. He showed me some clippings he had saved from the time Ty’s ‘Loan Arranger’ car lot failed. He seemed happy that Ty had gotten into trouble.
“His whole conversation was about making everyone else look bad—even his own children.”
At Ty’s urging, the King County Sheriff’s Office had updated his mother’s case. She would remain officially listed as missing, and they periodically reviewed her case. They certainly had more recent files on Bob Hansen’s temper tantrums, fights, and assaults. Of course, there was the case where he had held the young woman captive in his barn. Detective Jim Allen still did whatever he could to unravel the details of the long-vanished woman. If Joann was alive, she would be in her seventies.
If she was alive …
Some of the people Ty and Cindy had talked to thought that Joann was buried under Bob Hansen’s barn (which no longer existed); some believed she was even closer to where she was killed; Bob had built the Willows Apartments next door to their house close to the same time she vanished. Pat Martin said, “I think she’s in the foundation of those apartments on the Kent Des Moines Road.”
That was an eerie thought; Bob had moved his children into those apartment units when they were in their mid- to late teens.
Under construction, the Willows Apartments had little vegetation around them and could be clearly seen from the heavy traffic that moved up and down the Kent Des Moines Road, and from the Chevron station across the street. It would have been extremely difficult for Bob to bury a body beneath the strip of half-built apartments without someone noticing.
But there were other apartments that Bob Hansen had constructed. The Valley Apartments were virtually identical to the Willows, and the one-story brick building stood a few feet from where the old white barn had once been.
Although Detective Sergeant Jim Allen and prosecutor Jeff Baird had turned Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler away so many times, it didn’t mean they didn’t care or didn’t believe that Joann Hansen had been murdered decades earlier. The biggest problem was the ever-shrinking budget the King County executive and the county commissioners specified for both their departments.
Ty and Cindy were convinced that the most likely place to dig on the grounds would be where the old barn had been; it had been reduced to rubble, and that area was now covered by an asphalt road with the Green River only steps away. Another likely spot was under the Valley Apartments.
Ty and Cindy were exploring the possibility that new forensic tools said to spot bodies hidden in the earth might help to find Joann’s remains. It seemed such a long shot, and they knew it would be expensive.
In 2003, they contacted Bernard Housen, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, to see if it might be possible to use some kind of imaging—such as radar—to reveal a body buried in the ground. Cindy had read that an infrared process was being utilized in police investigations to spot disturbed earth and vegetation even though it wasn’t obvious to the naked eye. Red splotches often meant that plants and trees were slowly dying because their roots had been disturbed when murder victims’ graves were dug.
Housen explained that Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) could reveal clandestine grave sites up to twenty feet below the surface. It wasn’t foolproof, but with careful measurement of the areas to be searched, and by marking known objects already in the ground such as utility lines, buried storage tanks, or foundations long covered over with dirt, something unusual—an “anomaly”—might be seen and evaluated.
The old white barn where Ty and Nick used to play in the rafters, where Bob Hansen had temporarily imprisoned young women, was long gone now. An asphalt county road—S. 251st Street—had been built two to four feet over the barn’s concrete floor.
And the Valley Apartments had been constructed some years after Joann had disappeared.
Joann had technically received this land and the barn that once stood there in the division of the Hansens’ assets in 1962. But both had somehow ended up on Bob’s side of the ledger soon after she disappeared.
One of the renters in the Valley Apartments told Ty Hansen that she had always felt there was something odd about the cement floor in the laundry room, which all the tenants could use.
The laundry room, too, was added to the proposed radar search.
There would be four “digs” that followed this first attempt on October 7, 2003.
Bernard Housen worked from a scale map drawn to the dimensions of the area to be searched. Fifty-three transect lines were run so that any finding could be triangulated and both suspicious anomalies and benign anomalies located could be marked on the map.
A GSSI SIR 2000 Ground Penetrating Radar unit with a 400 MHz antenna would be used to detect data. Working between four large steel nails that were placed in the ground to mark the corners of the site, Housen dragged the antenna along the surface of each transect line. He walked at a slow but steady pace.
Would he find an anomaly that proved to be Joann Hansen’s bones? The conditions were perfect for the GPR search and both benign and unknown objects showed up.
Housen found three areas of “disturbed soil anomalies” from two to four feet below the cement barn floor pad.
“Are
as A, B, and E are all consistent in depth and size to represent a clandestine grave site.”
He warned, however, that there might be other causes for disturbed soil—such as the removal of stumps or rocks.
A GPR search of the Valley Apartments’ laundry room showed some similar findings. The concrete slab floor was inordinately thick for a laundry area—two to three feet. It had no rebar to stabilize it.
The only way to be sure of what lay beneath the old barn floor or the laundry room was to dig, take core samples, and bring in cadaver dogs. Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler were prepared to do that, even if they had to do the shoveling themselves.
Twice, Ty used an excavator to explore the area under S. 251st Street, digging six-foot chunks out of the dirt beneath the road.
He found nothing.
With fellow volunteers, Cindy Tyler and Ty began to cut through the cement slab in the Valley Apartments’ laundry area and the lawn outside.
“When Ty and I started digging there,” Cindy recalls, “both Detective Jim Allen and deputy prosecutor Jeff Baird grabbed shovels and joined us.
“There was a moment when I almost lost it,” she says, “when someone found a large bone. I really thought we had found Joann and I started to cry. They had a sheriff’s patrol car standing by and the bone was rushed downtown for the medical examiner’s office to check it out.
“But it wasn’t Joann; it was an animal bone. Eventually, we found so many animal bones, and every time we hoped we might have solved the mystery of where Ty’s mother was.
“We didn’t find her at the Valley Apartments, but we sure made a mess of the lawn,” Cindy said. “My brother, Russ Tyler, went back there with grass seed to try to bring it back to the way it was.”