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-c
ountry.”
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.
Nick wasn’t attracted to men; he was intrigued with what women thought and did. At parties, Nick always gravitated to circles where women were holding conversations.
Bob Hansen may have suspected what was going on with Nick—but he refused to acknowledge it. Of all men, Bob Hansen was the last one who could accept that his son was what was referred to as a “sissy boy.”
Bob was all man, strong, virile, powerful. But he once caught his elder son trying on some female clothes. And he was enraged.
Ty recalls seeing his father burn a dress when he and Nick were in junior high, but he knew better than to ask questions.
Although Nick didn’t suffer from beatings nearly as much as Ty did, this incident brought him a bruising.
Bob Hansen wanted sons who were athletes, sportsmen, and hunters. He wanted them to be womanizers, as he was, and took every opportunity to impress upon them that women weren’t as good as men and never could be. He would have preferred to have both Ty and Nick follow him into the construction business. Neither of them did, despite all the years that he trained them in every aspect of buying land, carpentry, painting, and how to treat tenants.
Bob had also wanted his daughter to be Miss America. But, tragically, when she failed to get to the top of the pageants she entered, Kandy Kay had turned to drugs.
In the end, Bob Hansen’s determination to have absolute control over his offspring only drove them away from him.
He had expected them to burnish his image, and found that they had dreams of their own.
Chapter Eleven
COSTA RICA
The part of the marital estate Joann had been awarded in the divorce proceedings where she had never appeared was supposed to be kept in trust for her children. It would have helped all of them when they came of age at eighteen. They needed it to pay for their educations, to find housing where they didn’t have to bend to their father’s will, and/or to start businesses.
But Bob Hansen met with lawyers who cleverly prevented the release of those trust funds. Kandy Kay might have received some property—but his sons got nothing. Somehow Joann’s share of the estate came back to Bob. His first attorney, James Gooding, was later shot to death in his Kent office by an angry tenant in one of his properties.
At that time Bob had already regained possession of the barn on the Green River and the Valley Apartments, built with the same plans as the Willows. The units sat next to the new freeway in Kent and ended up among Bob’s assets along with the other properties. They were literally a stone’s throw from the river.
In his fifties now, Bob Hansen had a lot of money—some estimated his wealth at more than $5 million. As far as anyone knew for sure, he hadn’t remarried after Joann went out of his life, but that may be inaccurate. In the late seventies and early eighties, he was extremely interested in dating. He joined Parents Without Partners and met a number of women
there. Of course, they didn’t suit him because he didn’t want any woman with an independent streak. He was annoyed to find that even the loneliest and least attractive of the single women in PWP seemed to be buying into equal rights for women.
Bob Hansen’s hair was still thick, and it was gray only at the temples. He was in shape. His three kids were out of his house and he felt free; he was ready to begin to enjoy life. He joined a number of social clubs in addition to Parents Without Partners, including the San Juan Club. Good-looking men were exceptionally popular at PWP; there were far more single women than men.
But Bob’s reputation preceded him. As handsome, tall, and rich as he was, most women still didn’t care for him after a date or two.
Bob Hansen did, however, meet other middle-aged to elderly men, his “wingmen” at PWP, who told him that there were countries where pretty women—young women—were looking for well-to-do American men to marry. And they weren’t bossy or demanding.
Bob was intrigued by the possibilities.
He had done a great deal of traveling in the continental United States: hunting, fishing, backpacking on horses and mules, and visiting many of the top tourist attractions.
In January 1980, he was fifty-six when he signed on for a seventeen-day luxury sailing trip on the barkentine Polynesia. The ship was 248 feet long and traveled to the Leeward Islands in the West Indies: St. Maarten, Anguilla, Saba, St. Barts, St. Kitts, and Statia. Bob was even allowed to steer the craft on a calm day and received a huge, flowery certificate memorializing his prowess.
From the West Indies, Bob went to Cancún, Mexico. As always, he took dozens of photographs, and posed for as many, filling still more scrapbooks. He felt comfortable in tropical climates, and he thoroughly enjoyed the many trips he embarked upon. The staff of the Polynesia served food, hors d’oeuvres, canapes, and liquor—anything he wanted—all free.