Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (21 page)

Walter and Joann Morrison buried their baby girl in a private ceremony at the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and they stopped at Pat and Louie’s house that evening. Joann seemed to take the loss with a kind of tragic acceptance, and she and Pat grew even closer than they had been before. They spent almost every day together while their husbands were at work, and Pat did her best to comfort her best friend.

Walter and Joann were complete opposites; he was very laid-back and content to spend all their evenings at home, while Joann longed to go out. She may have been running away from the grief of losing her baby or she may have just been terminally bored with her marriage. One day she admitted to Pat that she had had an affair with a physician in the town where they lived.

Pat was shocked. This warred with everything Joann had been taught by her parents and by most of her teachers at the Adventist Academy. Not all of her instructors had adhered to the religion’s tenets, however. Joann had also confessed to Pat that she had lost her virginity to one of her professors. No one else knew, and it had been a shock when the man seduced her.

As lovely as she was, Joann lived a conflicted life. She wanted to be a good mother and have new experiences and a relationship with a man who showed his affection for her. And she wanted to be a “good” woman. She had none of these things after Holly Lou died so suddenly.

The pressure of stifling her feelings backfired on Joann. One night she got up after midnight and went to her bathroom.

“She told me that when she looked into the mirror, her reflection was the face of the devil,” Pat recalls. “She got all hysterical and that was the beginning of what we called a nervous breakdown then. Walter took her to a private mental facility in Seattle where they gave her shock treatments.

“When they brought her back to her room, she was still under the effects of sodium pentothal. That was called ‘truth serum’ in the fifties. Walter sat there and asked her questions. She answered all of them, and some were about whether she had ever been with another man. She confessed her affair with the doctor. When her husband found out about her unfaithfulness, their marriage was over. Right then and there.”

Her psychiatrist told Joann that her breakdown had been caused by unresolved guilt. He felt that she wanted to live a different kind of life from what she had been taught was right, and she was fighting within herself. When she accepted that she deserved to be happy, her mental problems lessened.

When Joann was well and left the clinic, she moved into Pat and Louie’s home and lived with them until her divorce from Walter was complete. She then found a job with the telephone company in Auburn and moved into an apartment with her son, Bobby.

She continued to date prominent men in the south King County area, including corporate heads and attorneys, but none of her relationships worked out. Some of the men belatedly admitted they were married, and the single men had no intention of settling down.

In time, Pat also found a job with the telephone company.

“Joann and I had so much fun,” Pat recalls. “Many nights we went dancing, and Joann was always the belle of the ball.”

In 1957, Pat became pregnant for the third time. “That stopped the partying,” she remembers. “I quit my job and stayed home with my three children. Joann and I still saw each other every day. We were great friends, and I thought we always would be.”

The two young women did remain close even though Joann got married, too; they got together whenever they could and continued to share each other’s joys and sadnesses.

They could not know, as none of us can, what lay ahead in the future.

According to
Robert Milton Hansen, his early life was far more difficult than his first wife’s. He was born on October 13, 1924, near Eugene, Oregon, to a family who lived on a dairy farm. Lester and Helen Hansen had to work hard to support their two sons—Kenneth and Robert—and their four daughters. Bob’s first faded scrapbook has pictures of him and Kenneth from the time they were two and three years old, a photo of his family posing in front of a Danish Old People’s Home in Oregon, others of their dog, the two boys on new tricycles, and as teenagers. From the pictures, Kenneth and Robert seemed to have had a happy life, but no one can see through the walls of someone else’s home. There were no pictures of Bob’s sisters.

As young teenagers, Robert and Kenneth had to get up before dawn to milk the cows. If they failed to do that or didn’t do it fast enough, Bob later told people, their father beat them black and blue. However, the worst humiliation for Bob Hansen was that he didn’t have time to clean up
afterward and he often went to school with cow manure on his pants. The other students made fun of him and called him names.

“I made up my mind that no one would
ever
make fun of me again,” he told a neighbor some sixty years later.

As America plunged into the Great Depression, making a living became harder, and the Hansen family had to move from Oregon to Washington State. Their parents separated—but only so their mother could find work in Seattle. Kenneth went with his mother, Helen, and their sisters, where they started a small bakery in the Fremont district of Seattle. Bob and his father, Lester, moved to the West Hill of Kent, which was mostly covered in old-growth timber. They started from scratch on what Bob called the “Stump Farm.”

Bob hated it, and the work clearing the land was back-breaking, but Lester Hansen taught him the basics of carpentry, a skill that would be important to him in years to come.

Still, he felt he never pleased his father, who often asked Bob, “Why can’t you be more like Kenneth?”

Bob Hansen recalled his childhood with bitterness. He was a boy and then a man who would always see a glass as half empty.

Beginning with his own father, Bob felt that people treated him badly, cheated him, and tried to get whatever he had away from him. He distrusted almost everyone, although he could put on a jovial mask that hid his real feelings.

He told the few people he confided in that he could not
wait to get away from the Stump Farm, but, most of all, he wanted to leave his father far behind.

Bob grew to be six feet four inches tall, much taller than Kenneth and their father, and he weighed well over two hundred pounds. In his baby pictures, his hair was very light—what the Danes call “towhead”—and it was cut as if a bowl had been put over his head. At eighteen, it was still blond, but thick and wavy, and it added to his tanned good looks.

As soon as he graduated from high school, Bob joined the army. It was 1943, and the Second World War changed everyone’s lives. Bob was sent to Calcutta, India.

Although Bob saved the photos of his family that were taken up to the time he and Kenneth were about twelve and fourteen, there are far fewer family photographs as the years passed. And then, there are many pages of shots Bob took in India, usually of the natives who lived there, but occasionally he posed with the dark-haired Calcuttans while someone else took the pictures. One gets the sense that he really enjoyed his first trip outside the United States.

He was quite good-looking at twenty-one. Even so, none of his photos taken in India were of women, although he had dozens of pictures of dead poisonous snakes.

Bob Hansen was sent to the front lines, serving under General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as the Allied Forces fought to regain access to the Burma Road, which was overrun by the Japanese army. Indeed, Hansen’s scrapbook has snapshots of “Stilwell Road” and the town of Ledo. Indian, British, and Chinese forces combined to build the
Ledo Road, which would eventually intersect with the Burma Road. It was a project that was essential in defeating the Japanese.

It was also extremely dangerous, and Bob didn’t enjoy his time in India as much as he had earlier. Many years later, Bob told one of his few close friends, Marvin Milosevich, that he escaped his frontline duty—but he didn’t say how he managed that. He may have deserted; he may have only talked his way into a safer assignment.

When he left the army, Bob Hansen journeyed into the far North, and found jobs on fishing ships in Alaska. It was—and still is—a dangerous, exhausting occupation where ships and men are lost almost every year as they fight the violent sea and icy winds. But it paid well, and Bob Hansen felt he could withstand even the frightening storms that sent waves crashing over the bows of the ships he was on. As he would feel for most of his life, he was invincible.

Today the television show
The Deadliest Catch
draws thousands of viewers. It accurately depicts the kind of life Hansen lived when he set out to sea in Alaska.

In the off-season, he spent time in the Seattle area. Bob was thirty-two before he married for the first time. He was certainly as attracted to women as they were to him—at first. But for some reason, most of his romantic relationships ended suddenly and permanently.

Even her best friends don’t know exactly where Bob Hansen met Joann Cooper Morrison. But they began to date in the midfifties.

Bob seemed to be a good catch for a divorced woman with a small son. He was definitely single, he was tall and
good-looking, and he obviously made a good living. He wasn’t the most sentimental guy in the world, however. His view of women resembled attitudes held by men generations earlier. He saw them as less intelligent than men and felt their place was to be obedient and subservient.

At some point, Bob proposed to Joann and they got married. Just
when
their wedding took place is a matter of conjecture. Some legal papers set the date as April 13, 1956. It’s more likely that they married on April 13,
1957.
Patricia Martin recalls that Joann was pregnant when they got married; Joann gave birth to her oldest child with Bob, Nick, in November 1957.

Whatever their legal status was, in the beginning the Hansens lived in one of the first homes Bob owned—in Des Moines, Washington. It was a small white house, located behind a veterinarian’s clinic, and it had a bird’s-eye view of Puget Sound three blocks west.

Joann spent fishing seasons alone with Bobby and the baby, Nick. Bob was still spending months away, fishing and crabbing in Alaska. But when Joann became pregnant with their second child—Ty—Bob realized that his Alaskan adventures were coming to a close. Despite its hardships, he had enjoyed the challenge of fighting the angry, freezing sea that gave up salmon, crab, and bottom fish only grudgingly.

Since his days on the Stump Farm, Bob Hansen had been interested in construction, and he began as an apprentice carpenter in the South King County area.

He had native intelligence and he was as strong as an ox. He set his sights on a career as a contractor. Gradually,
he learned how to build almost anything, and he soon had all the good jobs he wanted with construction firms.

Bob had planned to build his family another—larger—home in the near future.

And he did.

He also began to look for cheap houses to buy where he could leverage his investments with low down payments and long-term contracts. As soon as he bought property, he found renters, and their monthly payments took care of his mortgages.

Former tenants recall that he wasn’t an understanding landlord—to say the least. If they failed to pay the rent on time and were even a few days late, he banged on their front doors and told them to get out—at once. He wasn’t concerned with thirty-day notices, or interested in their excuses. He was such a large man, and he intimidated most people.

Surprisingly, Bob Hansen couldn’t understand why his evacuated renters left his apartments and houses in bad shape. His friends who were landlords—and who followed rental statutes dictated by the state—never had that much damage. Bob, along with his sons Nick and Ty, spent a lot of time painting and repairing empty rentals.

It was during this period in the sixties that Hansen was approached by a man named Milosevich who wanted to hire him to build a spec house. Bob agreed to the project, but he said he would need a helper.

That was when the elder Milosevich suggested that his son, Marv, who was about twenty, would make a good assistant in building the spec house.

“Bob Hansen was a nonunion employer,” Marv remembers, “and I got paid a dollar fifty an hour when the union rate was three fifty, but he was a good teacher, and I learned everything there was to know about the construction business. My wife, LaVonne, would ask me why I kept working for Bob when I could get so much more money from a union contractor, and I explained that nobody else could train me to be a contractor myself the way Bob did. I was getting an education, even while I was losing money.”

LaVonne agrees, after almost fifty years of marriage, that Marv’s success in building and real estate started with his working with Bob Hansen. That is not to say, however, that LaVonne liked Bob. She tolerated him because Marv liked him.

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.”