He walked the ten or twelve feet next door and could see that the garage windows were fogged over. When he found a clear spot to look inside, he saw Bob Hansen sitting as still as death behind the steering wheel of his car. He knew instantly that Bob hadn’t died of a stroke or heart attack; he had died the way he’d once told Marv Milosevich he’d chosen.
By his own hand. With the help of carbon monoxide. His skin was the characteristic bright cherry red that appears when carbon monoxide shuts off oxygen in the blood.
Some might say that Robert Milton Hansen’s death was a prime example of “What goes around, comes around.”
His life had ended in ashes. He was alone in an empty house and he had alienated everyone who might have been there for him when he was an old man.
Hansen would never achieve his dream of starting life over in Costa Rica with a new young woman. That country had barred him as a candidate for citizenship. The luxurious condo he had furnished lavishly wouldn’t be his home—ever.
But he had avoided living in a nursing home.
He had told Marv Milosevich that he would go out of this world in his own way. He had accomplished that bleak ambition; his final act ensured that he was in control. Or was he? The chilling aspect of suicide by carbon monoxide is that, at a certain point, the brain is still active—but the subject cannot move. If Bob Hansen had changed his mind partway through his suicide plan, paralysis would have already overtaken his body.
There had been no going back.
There was little of any value in Bob Hansen’s last house. Everything was secondhand, worn, and cheap. Hansen’s yellow notes and his journals remained—on almost all of them he’d written about mundane things: reminders, his opinions, scraps and bits of disorganized news left behind for strangers to find.
Ty, Nicole Hansen, and Cindy Tyler removed only the stacks of photo albums that Bob had kept since he was twenty. There were faded pictures of their mother in some of them, and photos of themselves as babies and in their growing-up years. They could all see Joann’s tenderness toward her babies; it was something to hold on to.
There were forty times as many photographs of Bob posing with dead animals, birds, and fish—his trophies from sixty or more years of hunting and fishing.
That was his legacy.
This was the house that Kathleen Huget had walked into a few weeks later, the rooms where she would “hear” both a silent cry for help and a sense of looming rage and danger.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Kathleen had shouted into the empty rooms, and her voice didn’t tremble at all. “I’m not afraid of you! You don’t scare me, and you can’t hurt me!”
Initially, she knew nothing about the man who had lived and died in this house, but the eerie presence of evil she sensed couldn’t be denied.
The Realtor friend of Kathleen’s had told her she could have anything she found in the house. A lot of it was usable if not new. She neither needed nor wanted it, but she didn’t feel as if she could just take it to the dump.
“I had an estate sale,” she said. “I figured if there was any profit, I could give it to charity.”
Lots of people showed up on the day of the sale. Sophisticated bargain hunters soon moved on after they saw that there were no precious antiques or collectors’ items in the yellow rambler in Auburn.
“But there were poor people who came,” Kathleen recalls. “There were quite a few migrant workers in the area during harvest season in August and September. Most of them were barely making it. They were so happy to find six pairs of socks for a dollar, or a table for fifteen dollars. Before long, I cut the prices in half. An old bed meant so much to them, or some dishes that didn’t match. Some of them called relatives and they came to the sale, too. In the end, I was giving things away, and it was a wonderful experience to see how grateful they were.”
Having heard of Bob Hansen’s stinginess and his scorn for anyone who gave to charitable causes, Kathleen admits that she took a certain satisfaction as she virtually donated all his possessions to people who basically had nothing.
“I knew he would have hated my doing that,” she said with a smile. “He never believed in helping poor people, and now they were driving and walking away with the things he’d left behind, with their little kids jumping up and down with excitement.”
Chapter Nineteen
A LANDMARK LAWSUIT
Ty had attempted to file a lawsuit against his father in 2006, believing that the only thing that might get the old man’s attention would be to threaten his bank account.
“I didn’t want his money,” Ty says, “but I wanted to honor my mother, to somehow let her know that we were still fighting for her. We had run out of money to hire excavators and bulldozers in our search for her remains. If we could finally get the inheritance that our mother had left us, we could keep on looking for her. But I couldn’t find a lawyer who would take my case.”
The Christmas season was in full swing in late November 2009, and Bob Hansen had been dead for four months when Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler finally located an attorney who would represent Ty and Nicole.
Dean Brett, a Bellingham lawyer, agreed to file a wrongful death suit on behalf of Joann Hansen’s estate.
It seemed a unique legal situation. Their surviving children were suing on behalf of their mother, dead for almost five decades, against their father, also deceased.
A King County judge had ruled in 1969 that Joann Cooper Hansen was legally dead—even though her body had never been found. By 1975, thirteen years had passed with not one sign of her. Nor had her remains surfaced by 2009, despite the determined hunt kept alive by Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler.
Sergeant John Urquhart, spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office, said that as far as his department was concerned, Joann’s case had remained open in 1975. “And it remains open today.”
Urquhart said that Bob Hansen had, indeed, been a person of interest in Joann’s disappearance, but that sheriff’s detectives had never been able to find enough evidence to file murder charges against him.
“At the time Joann Hansen disappeared,” Sergeant Urquhart added, “missing persons cases weren’t pursued as vigorously as they are today.”
So many people had been afraid of Bob Hansen, and Ty and Cindy hoped that frightened witnesses might feel safe enough to come forward now that he was dead. Someone, somewhere, had to have information—no matter how slight it might be—that could be tied with what was known to finally weave a net that would incriminate Bob. He couldn’t be tried in regular court now, but he might be facing a higher judgment beyond life.
If her children could bury Joann’s earthly remains in a cemetery with a headstone, it would mean the world to them.
No amount of money could ever compensate Joann’s children for the loss of their mother when they were only toddlers, nor could it erase the pain and suffering she had endured in her brutal marriage and in her sad anticipation of her own death.
Local papers in Seattle and in adjoining counties carried the story of the bizarre lawsuit. Forty-seven years later, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer did cover the mystery of Joann Hansen’s disappearance. KOMO-TV, the ABC affiliate in Seattle, heard from the network headquarters in New York after they did a comprehensive overview of Ty and Nicole Hansen’s suit against their late father.
“Would Ty Hansen be willing to be interviewed by Chris Hansen (no relation) regarding the lawsuit he had filed?”
Of course Ty would! He had done his best to gain publicity that might reach someone who knew something about his mother. Her photographs and the history of the case were registered on the Doe Network, a successful clearinghouse for missing persons and unidentified bodies in America. Joann’s face—as she had looked in 1962—was also on posters and fliers sent out by smaller organizations dedicated to locating the lost souls who had never come home.
Chris Hansen, famous as the NBC reporter who meets internet stalkers looking for underaged girls and boys on To Catch a Predat
or, conducted an interview with a man with the same last name. They were not related. Chris and Ty Hansen were almost the same age, in their early fifties.
Ty explained that he had always been told his mother deliberately left their family, and he had only become suspicious when he read his parents’ divorce papers from 1962 and realized that his mother had claimed she suffered from violence and abuse.
“No matter who I’ve talked to, my father’s friends, my mother’s lawyer, and even my aunts—my mother’s sisters whom I didn’t even know existed—have told me the same story. They all say, ‘Well, your dad killed your mom and he probably buried her down there at the barn site.’
“My father knew I was investigating, but he never reached out to say, ‘Stop!’ He just basically told me to go to hell,” Ty Hansen continued. “I went to his house several times in 2005 and 2006, while I was traveling to do more legwork on the project. I’d visit him and confront him. I’d say to him, ‘Dad, I think you killed Mom. I think you’re a liar, a murderer, and a coward.’ And he’d just cuss at me and tell me to get off his property.”
Ty told Chris that he had also made it a practice to drive by his father’s house in Auburn—not stopping, but letting his father know that he hadn’t given up his crusade to find his mother.
And then their détente was over. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office notified Ty Hansen in August 2009 that his father was dead. He had committed suicide by asphyxiation.
To say that Ty and Nicole grieved wouldn’t be correct. Ty had attempted to forgive his father and to ask forgiveness for doing what he had to do. And Bob Hansen had wanted none of it.
“I think the prospects didn’t seem very good to him,” Ty told Chris Hansen. “So he decided he was done with it.”
Ty said he’d discovered his father’s tax records that indicated the eighty-four-year-old man’s assets totaled almost $5 million. But he wasn’t truly suing Bob Hansen’s estate for monetary gain. Still, he’d already heard from people who accused him of greed and of dishonoring his father.
They had no idea of what the real story was.
“I was doing it for my mother,” Ty explained. “Not for money. I don’t care what people say about me. It doesn’t bother me one single bit whether I get nothing or everything. It makes no difference. I’m still going to pursue this mystery.”
Ty had far more supporters in his years-long hunt for his mother than he had detractors.
In the end, Ty and Nicole prevailed in the suit against their father’s estate. It validated their knowledge that Joann Hansen had meant for them to have her estate when they reached eighteen. But they got very little money to help in the continuing exploration of the ground beneath where the old barn and the Valley Apartments had been. The amount of the settlement was just under $100,000, and it was divided three ways. Ty, Nicole, and Dean Brett, their attorney, each got one third.
Herb and Lily Stuart, Bob’s friends in Costa Rica, got all the rest of his estate, including his condominium and the house in Auburn.
This is where things stood in 2010 when Ty Hansen, Cindy Tyler, and Kathleen Huget contacted me. None of them wanted money for the story of Joann Hansen; each of them begged me to write it only to keep her memory alive, and in the hope that this book might eventually help in their search for her.
Like Kathleen, I was quickly caught up in the mystery and tragedy of it all, and particularly in the injustice done to a young mother, close to my age, who lived a few blocks away from where I’d moved a year after she’d disappeared. If the timing had been just a little different, I probably would have known her. Maybe I could even have helped Joann escape safely from Bob.
If Joann had lived, Kandy Kay—the same age as my daughter, Leslie—would have probably been one of the girls in my Brownie troop, and she would likely be alive today. Ty, of course, did play baseball with my son, Andy.
But life is always a series of connections and near misses. Decades of “If only …” In the end, the one thing I could do for Joann and her abused children was to write her story.
And to try to find her earthly remains.
Chapter Twenty
COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?
Ty, Cindy, and Nicole had often been energized whenever news reports mentioned that an unidentified female body had been found—only to be disappointed when they learned that none of the remains were Joann’s.
Beginning in 1974 with Ted Bundy’s swath of terror in the Northwest, and continuing in 1982 with Gary Ridgway’s Green River victims, there were scores of news flashes about young women whose bodies had been located. Bundy’s victims were found in mountain foothills or in their own beds, Ridgway’s in secluded wooded areas. Gary Ridgway buried some of the unfortunate young women he murdered in shallow graves.
Not all of the unidentified women could be traced to either of those infamous serial killers. And there were always women who, like Joann Hansen, had seemingly disappeared into the mists of time.
On September 7, 2010, a backhoe operator was working on the water system of a golf course in the new and expensive resort that had been built on formerly forested land. Suncadia is located between the towns of Cle Elum and Roslyn just beyond the eastern foothills of the Snoqualmie mountain range.
Ironically, one of the area’s only tourist attractions before Suncadia was an acres-wide cemetery where Slavic coal miners and their families were buried early in the twentieth century. The gravestones bear photos of the deceased encased in celluloid. Although vandals have pried many of the photographs out, the graveyard is still a fascinating study in life, death, and tragedy of more than a century ago.
The other attraction is the town of Roslyn, where the wildly popular television series Northern Exposure was filmed. A giant moose is still painted on one of the downtown buildings.
Land for the Suncadia Resort was cleared in 2002. It now draws visitors, sometimes to the distress of old-timers who loved the old towns and the forests and lakes just beyond the hamlet’s limits. They knew for years it was inevitable that wealthy investors would discover Kittitas County, and they dreaded it.
Now they had no choice but to accept it as progress.
The backhoe operator unearthed a shallow grave, not more than two feet below the surface.
A skeleton lay beneath. There was precious little evidence to identify him or her, only some blue clothing and a simple gold wedding ring in size five or six.
Kittitas County undersheriff Clayton Myers told reporters that it would take at least two days to remove the remains, as his department had contacted forensic anthropologists so that the skeleton could be very carefully lifted from the earth. They believed, however, that the body was that of a female between five feet four and five feet ten inches tall, and probably somewhere in the age range of nineteen to forty years old.
She had straight teeth and extensive dental work.
When I saw the forensic artist’s drawing of what the woman probably looked like in life—using the dimensions of the skull—my heart stood still for a moment.
The sketch looked a great deal like Joann Hansen—the same long jaw, cheekbones, forehead.
Since Suncadia was only eight years old, the body had almost certainly been buried in the woods long before that. Hunters, fishermen, miners, and loggers were about the only humans who ventured deep into the wilderness.
Ty Hansen was doubtful; he had been through similar situations before, and he didn’t let himself hope that this could be, at last, his mother.
Sadly, Ty was right. Kittitas investigators had checked out all the missing woman reports in the state of Washington, they had distributed photographs of the drawing and the gold ring, and they entered her dental records in the NCIC computer bank—all to no avail.
It was months later when one family came forward, hoping against hope that the body in the Suncadia Golf Course was not their daughter.
The mother of Kerry May-Hardy had allowed the Green River Task Force to take a sample of her own DNA in 20
04, fearful that her daughter might be one of Gary Ridgway’s victims. It hadn’t matched any of the initially nameless dead girls.
It took months to compare that DNA with DNA taken from one of the bones of the still unidentified body found in September 2010.
But the FBI laboratory found an absolute match; the deceased was Kerry May-Hardy, who had disappeared from Seattle’s Capitol Hill district in June 1972. She was twenty-two when she vanished. Kerry was married at that time. One of her relatives believed that Kerry had lived in an apartment on an upper floor of the building that housed the Crisis Clinic in 1972, but that wasn’t true. There were no apartments in that towering old Victorian house, and the comings and goings of people who weren’t authorized to be there were monitored very carefully.
As this is written, investigators are backtracking on Kerry May-Hardy’s life, hoping to find information that will lead to her killer.
The search for Joann Hansen continues. This book may prove to be the one avenue that will lead Ty and Nicole Hansen and Cindy Tyler to the truth about what happened to a young woman who literally faced death so that she could be with her children and raise them in a loving home.
When I look back over the hundreds of disappearance and homicide cases I have been asked to explore over the last forty years, I realize that they all come down to human emotions that have somehow run off the tracks. Synchronicity and chance bring people together, and not all of these connections end happily. I still believe that Ty Hansen will find his mother, although I wouldn’t wager on how long it may take.
One thing I do know: Ty, Cindy Tyler, and Nicole will never give up their search for Joann and the truth about the end of her life.
Anyone with information, no matter how slight, on Joann’s life in August of 1962 should contact the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle or myself at www.annrules.com. I will see that those messages reach Ty Hansen.