Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (20 page)

Frankly, sometimes my response to these people I don’t know ends up with my getting trapped by delusional personalities, or those who
think
they have discovered “a sure bestseller and a movie, too.” There are usually a dozen reasons why they are wrong. Kathleen Huget was extremely cautious about approaching me until she knew she could trust me to be discreet, and I was just as cautious about meeting her in person. Considering the genre in which I write, that isn’t unusual. I fear that if I met every stranger who contacts me, I would be opening a Pandora’s box of problems. And I’ve guessed wrong a number of times.

But somehow I felt a kinship with Kathleen Huget, and this time I was right. Rather than opening Pandora’s box I was opening a “hope chest” for many people who have sought to unveil fifty years of lies and bring some kind of peace to a beautiful young woman named Joann.

Kathleen Huget and
her husband, Jeff, live in a gated community on a hill east of Kent, Washington. They belong to an elite country club, and they live comfortably. Kathleen was once a flight attendant and Jeff was a varsity football player at the University of Washington. They found each other when they were in their middle years, they’re very happily married, and they share interests but allow each other to follow separate paths when it comes to hobbies.

Kathleen is an attractive woman with startling blue eyes, wildly spiky blond hair, and a flair for fashion. Her main profession is as an interior designer—but she’s not afraid to get her hands dirty or tackle physical labor. She is also a frustrated detective. When she attended Eastern Washington University in Cheney, she took a number of courses in criminal justice and law. Her internship was with the Spokane County public defender, where her boss was Dick Cease. Cease spent twenty-four years as the public defender, serving as the first head of that office, which was created in 1970. Kathleen did a lot of background
checks and research, and she felt she might have found her niche. But her life changed and went in another direction.

Her curiosity, however, did not.

I don’t think she would disagree with me when I say she is also something of a psychic, or, more properly, a sensitive. All of us have the capability to listen to other voices in other rooms when there is actually no one there—but most of us don’t want to tap into that or open ourselves up to ghostlike entities who have secrets to tell.

Kathleen Huget has a friend who is a Realtor, who has called upon Kathleen a few times to clean out houses where the owners have left abruptly. To make a house appealing to prospective buyers, someone has to sort through what is valuable, what can be donated to charities, and what is ready for a trip to the dump.

In the late summer of 2009, Kathleen—with Jeff’s help—agreed to clean up a house in the Kent Valley so that it could go on the market. She had no idea who had lived there, but she was told that the owner had committed suicide on the property. She would have discovered that soon enough by herself; the double garage still had pipes, tubes, and other paraphernalia that had been used to direct carbon monoxide into a vehicle with no ventilation.

As she worked from room to room, she also found a book titled
Final Exit.
The author is Derek Humphry, who started the Hemlock Society, which supported an individual’s rights to choose his own time and means of death. When the book was published in 1991, critics were shocked at the number of “recipes” for suicide it held.

In the copy Kathleen held, she saw that someone had used a yellow highlighter to underline several methods Humphry suggested: death by suffocation with a plastic bag, death by barbiturates—after first complaining to a physician that one could not sleep and asking for much milder sleeping pills to allay suspicion and then hoarding them—and, finally, asphyxiation with carbon monoxide using car exhaust.

The third solution was obviously the one the late homeowner had used.

Being in an empty house where a suicide had occurred didn’t bother Kathleen Huget, but she was curious about the things that had been left behind. When the draft from an open door blew in, dozens of yellow notepad pages, tacked to every wall, fluttered. They were mostly reminders, scrawled words that she figured someone whose memory was faltering had written.

A man had lived here only weeks before; from the notes, she felt it might be someone who was in poor health and feared his mind was failing him, someone who had given up all hope.

The house where she spent her few weeks working was a nice house, a yellow rambler that was neither modest nor ostentatious. Other than the uninspired and neglected landscaping, the exterior belied the condition of the interior. The lawn and shrubs were neat enough, and there were several sheds and outbuildings at the rear of the home. The house was 1,490 square feet with three bedrooms and two and a half baths, built on a fifth of an acre.

But the inside of the house on 14th NE in Auburn was
bleak. As Kathleen worked her way from room to room, the things she found were either well used or strange—or both. She realized that the man who had died here had purchased almost everything from thrift stores. Although the house itself was well built and upscale, she thought that the occupant must have fallen on hard times. That happened to a lot of people.

She had no idea that his estate was worth $5 million!

There were no signs that a woman had lived there; it was definitely a bachelor’s pad, with no feminine touches to soften its rough edges.

The yellow notes were mostly prosaic: “I must be sure and stay hydrated,” and “60 Minutes—Sunday, Channel 7, 7 o’clock.”

A few seemed to reflect his state of mind: “I have had my share of trouble and sadness—Man has a [
sic
] astounding ability to survive lifes [
sic
] unhappyiness [
sic
].”

However, one was puzzling; it seemed to be a quote that the dead man had copied.

“Ty: ‘I won’t stop until I find her bones!’”

What on earth, Kathleen wondered, was that about?

Kathleen Huget learned the name of the dead man: Robert Hansen. A common surname—my mother’s maiden name—and also the name of a television reporter who became interested in the story hidden behind the story: Chris Hansen.

Someone had been to the house in Auburn before Kathleen, and they had removed personal papers and anything that might have been of value. She learned that Bob Hansen hadn’t been ill or incapacitated. In fact, he’d routinely
walked the banks of the Green River for miles every day, picking up cans, bottles, and other garbage that marred the peacefulness of the river that had recently become infamous due to the murders committed there by the Green River Killer.

She wondered what might have caused the desperate depression that led to Hansen’s suicide on August 4.

Being inside the yellow house too long could become oppressive, but the weather was nice and Kathleen began to meet neighbors as she carried garbage containers and donation bags out to her SUV. They were all quite open to talking about their late neighbor, although opinions differed.

Hansen’s male neighbors spoke of him as being a good guy—a man’s man—but the women who lived nearby didn’t seem nearly as taken with him. Apparently he had seen females as second-class citizens.

The days passed, and Kathleen felt a presence in the house. It wasn’t that someone was actually there, at least not any living entity. If she believed ghosts could harm her, she might have been afraid. She felt that someone was asking her for help, and another presence wanted her to go away.

“I was never frightened,” she remembers. “But I felt a residue of rage, the sense that someone or something hated my going through the house. I actually found myself speaking out loud a few times, saying, ‘I’m not afraid of you! You don’t scare me, and you can’t hurt me!’”

Edgar Smith,* the next-door neighbor, told her that he had found his neighbor’s body.

“We had a kind of signal system,” he said. “When he got up in the morning, he’d come outside and blow this horn he had. It was from an old car he had once, and it went, Ooga! Ooga! When I heard that horn go off, I knew he was all right. He wasn’t that young anymore, and, of course, he lived all alone.

“This one morning—August 4—I didn’t hear the horn. I looked over at his garage and the windows looked like they were fogged over with smoke,” Edgar recalled. “I knew instantly what had happened.”

His neighbor had been dead of carbon monoxide poisoning for several hours.

When she began cleaning out the house on Green River Road, Kathleen Huget had no idea of its history and knew nothing about the former owner’s life. She and her husband, Jeff, knew the attorney who was representing the estate of the dead man because they belonged to the same country club, but of course he was not at liberty to discuss his late client’s affairs, and the Hugets knew better than to ask.

Puzzled, Kathleen googled Bob Hansen’s name and date of death on her computer. Hansen, like Olsen and Carlsen, was a common Danish name, and the Northwest is rife with Scandinavians. Finally she found the short video that investigative reporter Chris Hansen had done for NBC News. It was about a son who was suing his deceased father because he believed that his father had killed his mother.

Joann.

Joann Hansen had simply vanished almost fifty years earlier and had never been found—alive or dead.

That was unusual enough to be picked up by news services, and Chris Hansen’s segment on it was only a few minutes long, but it was enough to make Kathleen want to know more about the circumstances.

Kathleen Huget felt a cold shiver when she looked at an area behind the house, not a pantry exactly, more of a toolshed. Part of it had a cement floor while another section was only hard-packed dirt.

As she sorted and cleaned to make the house more desirable to potential buyers, she noticed a small bowl of miscellaneous items, a catchall, like we all have, where we throw stamps, paper clips, marbles, pretty pebbles, and myriad things that don’t belong anywhere else. The collection in the bowl included a small souvenir bell shaped in the form of the Space Needle, the soaring landmark built for the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962.

Another item was a spent bullet—a slug with the hollow point “nose” mushroomed by some impact. It had been fired from a Winchester Model 70 rifle. The casing that had once held the slug was gone. This was a powerful rifle and the bullet would have gone clean through a human being and impacted the first hard surface it hit.

Kathleen also found a list of the guns Bob Hansen had owned, with their serial numbers. They ranged from handguns to rifles and shotguns. He had noted thirty-two guns, and crossed out twenty-two of them. Interestingly, one of the rifles he had either sold or traded—or otherwise disposed of—was a Winchester Model 70 rifle.

Family members had already taken what they wanted from the house and didn’t want anything that was left. But for whatever reason, Kathleen saved the bell and the slug from the items in the bowl. She didn’t know anything about ballistics herself, but she could ask someone.

An almost obsessive curiosity was growing in her. True, she had a job history as an investigator and freely acknowledges that she loves a mystery, and she felt there was a mystery of major proportions associated with this house full of junk, dust, notes, spiderwebs, and the lingering onus of death by a man’s own hand.

There were others who knew what the mystery was, others who had struggled for years to unravel it.

And, thus far, they had failed.

The man who
had died in the ranch house in Auburn had had three wives in his life, or rather, three women he considered wives whether their connection was legal or not. The first was Joann (Jo-Ann) Ellen Cooper Morrison,* who was born on July 19, 1932.

Joann and her three sisters—Maxine, Alice, and Glenna Rae—were raised in Auburn, Washington, one of the small towns in the Kent Valley that flourished when the rich loam of the earth there made small farms burst with life. All four of the sisters attended the Auburn Adventist Academy from the forties to the early fifties, and graduated from there. It was a strict, religious school and the Cooper girls lived rather sheltered lives. Joann hated the academy and couldn’t wait to graduate.

Joann was a tall slender young woman with long dark hair. She was also quite beautiful. Friends who knew her in her twenties recall her as high-spirited and glamorous.

Her best friend, Patricia Martin—who has always called her Joan—says, “When Joann walked into a room,
everyone stopped and looked. She knew she was sexy and she had all the confidence in the world. Actually, she never
walked
into a room, she made an entrance!”

Joann and Pat met when they both lived on J Street in Auburn in 1955. Pat was married to Louie Malesis and Joann to Walter Morrison. Louie and Walter had gone to school together, and they discovered they lived only six blocks apart. Joann had a baby boy—Bobby—and Pat had a baby son, too, Michael. Both women were in their early twenties.

“Back then,” Pat remembers, “young families only had one car so most days, when their housework was done, the wives visited, drank coffee, and smoked while our children played.”

The two women became really good friends in the midfifties and they shared secrets, the problems of their second pregnancies, and how to make their budgets stretch. A year after they met, Joann and Pat both gave birth to baby girls. Joann named her baby Holly Lou and Pat called her daughter Patti Lou.

They often exchanged babysitting. One night when the baby girls were about a month old, Joann asked Pat if she would babysit for Holly Lou while she and Walter went to the movies.

“I don’t know why I said no,” Pat says, “but I did. I just didn’t feel like babysitting. So Joann and Walter stayed home, and that night Holly Lou died in her sleep—of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. I felt so bad for Joann, but I was grateful I hadn’t been looking after Holly Lou; SIDS happens, I know, but I would have always felt guilty if she had died at my house.”