Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (23 page)

Like their mother, they were never quite sure what might set him off. He beat them regularly; his punishments were more than spankings. Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were so small, and he was a very large, powerful man.

Patricia Martin knew better than to visit Joann when Bob was home, but they managed to get together on afternoons when they knew he was far away on a construction job. One day Pat’s son and Joann’s oldest son, Bobby Morrison, were wrestling around and accidentally knocked over the Christmas tree.

“We all panicked,” Pat remembers, “but somehow we got it back up and the ornaments on the tree just before Bob came home. He never knew about it.”

Bob always wanted to have a big Christmas. He had his camera handy, and he took photos of everyone opening presents and of the many decorations Joann had put up. Her parents and sisters weren’t invited, however. Bob didn’t care for them, and he frowned whenever Joann wanted to visit with them. It is a classic ploy for abusive husbands and boyfriends: separate the women from their families and friends so they will have no one to run to.

There were so many times when Bob humiliated Joann.

On a rare occasion, Pat and her husband, Louie, who was a police officer in Auburn, Washington, joined a group of people that included Bob and Joann for a night of dancing.

The Spanish Castle, a dance hall that dated back to the twenties, stood on the corner of Pacific Highway South—“Old 99”—and the busy Kent Des Moines Road. The dusty yellow stucco structure was long past its glory days when big name bands played there, but it still featured local bands that drew crowds. It was only three miles or so from the brown house where Joann and Bob lived.

The group was having a good time on that Saturday night until Joann apparently said or did something that made Bob mad.

“He knocked her right out of her chair, onto the floor,” Pat says. “She was hurt and very embarrassed. People stared for a couple of minutes, and then they went back to drinking and dancing.”

Nobody reported it to the police.

Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine that women were considered chattel by some men then—that they could be savagely abused in front of witnesses and no one interfered. But the term “battered woman” had yet to be coined. Women were humiliated and—more often than not—afraid to come forward; the majority of wives didn’t work and were dependent on their husbands financially.

Certainly, there are legions of abused women today but at least there are safe places and support groups where they can run if they have the courage to leave.

Joann Hansen had few options.

She was an immaculate housekeeper and a good cook who kept within the budget Bob allowed for groceries. But their house on the road to Saltwater State Park in Des Moines wasn’t homey. The wood floors were dark; Bob liked the brown furniture, his trophies of dead animals mounted on the walls, and his cabinets filled with guns.

Both Bob and Joann lived behind masks, trying to keep their secrets from prying eyes. He wanted his friends and other people to view him as a good family man. Like his own parents’ scrapbook, where he and his brother Ken smiled for the camera, the younger Hansens’ album is full of photos of them and their children. Bob and Joann’s “wedding” photo depicts a willowy bride with an orchid corsage feeding cake to her handsome groom. There are the birth announcements, the babies’ nursery identification cards, baby pictures, family reunions, snapshots of Bob and the kids on one outing or another, all looking joyful.

They could easily have been chosen for the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post.

No one who hadn’t seen her cuts and bruises could have guessed that the beautiful Joann, who still made an entrance when she and Bob had their infrequent dates, was so afraid behind her carefully constructed facade.

Bob was very successful in real estate investments and in construction. He worked hard and he was shrewd when it came to buying property. Although he wouldn’t allow Joann to buy anything without his permission, his family
always had food and shelter. As obsessed as he was with hunting and fishing, their large freezer in the basement was well stocked with elk, venison, and all kinds of fish. Bob smoked much of the salmon he caught, and he made ground venison quite palatable by mixing it with beef fat.

Again and again, Joann tried to convince herself that somehow he would soften if she just tried harder or found the right combination that pleased him.

Sadly, the scenario she envisioned was hopeless.

One evening in the early part of 1962, Joann prepared some trout that Bob had caught. She, Bob, and their children were sitting at their trestle table with benches on either side. Joann, as always, sat closest to the kitchen so she could jump up and get whatever Bob wanted. She was afraid she might be pregnant again, but that was no guarantee that she was safe from physical abuse.

As they ate in silence, Bob noticed that she had peeled the skin off her portion of fish and pushed it to the side of her plate.

“Eat the skin,” he ordered her.

“But I don’t like the skin,” she protested.

“Eat it!”

“I can’t,” she said. “It will make me sick.”

Suddenly he swung one muscular arm and knocked her off the bench.

This was just one of many times when Joann had done something, all unaware, that tapped into Bob’s boiling rage. Sobbing, she ran to the kitchen while Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty sat, stunned and confused, at the table.

Bob left the table and returned with a two-shot Derringer pistol. “See this,” he instructed his three small children. “This is what we’re going to use to kill Mommy with.”

The children would not remember this, but Joann heard it, and she knew he meant it. She told Pat Martin she was very afraid Bob might kill her.

It was too much.

When Bob Hansen left for the construction site the next morning—July 25—Joann gathered up her children and fled to Patricia Martin’s house. Pat hid Joann’s blue Chevrolet so Bob wouldn’t know where she and the children were, and Joann got a restraining order that forbade his coming close to her. She believed that if he did, she could call the police and they would protect her.

She was adamant that she wanted a divorce, even though she was fearful of Bob’s reaction. She and the children drove back to Pat’s house.

Joann didn’t know any attorneys or where to start. She knew a Realtor in Auburn who shared his office with an attorney named Luther Martin (no relation to Patricia Martin). As fate would have it, Martin was out of town for some time. But she saw another lawyer’s shingle right across the street. Determined, she asked the Realtor to take her over and introduce her to Duncan Bonjorni.

If any attorney could have helped Joann, it was Bonjorni.
A former justice of the peace and police judge, Bonjorni was both brilliant and fearless. He had paid his way through law school by working forty-eight hours a week, much of the time as a Capitol policeman in Olympia.

He studied Joann Hansen.

“I knew her husband,” the now-retired Bonjorni recalls. “He was a mean son of a bitch. There’s no other way to put it. He appeared before me once when I was a judge—he got into a shouting match with another driver at a place in Renton we called ‘suicide corner.’ I remember that he cut the other guy off, and they argued. When the other driver pulled away, Bob followed him, caught up with him, and took out a crowbar or tire jack and started hitting his car, breaking the windshield and denting the vehicle, and he was threatening the guy.”

Police were called and Bonjorni sentenced Hansen to twenty-four hours in jail, knowing he’d made an enemy. “I was too dumb to be afraid of him, I guess. But I still wouldn’t have wanted to meet him in a dark alley. His hands were as big as hams.”

Now, in late April 1962, Duncan Bonjorni asked Joann Hansen: “Are there any marks on you?”

Without saying a word, Joann stood up, removed her sleeveless blouse, and lowered her pedal pushers.

Bonjorni had seen cases of spousal abuse before—but nothing like this. “She was covered with bruises. She had one huge bruise—as big as a saucer—on her left side. Her husband had hit her mostly on that side—her ribs, her breasts, her thigh,” Bonjorni remembers. “She didn’t have a mark on her face—or anywhere that showed.”

Knowing how big Bob Hansen was, the attorney realized that Joann would have “looked like a small child” next to him.

“She was tremendously afraid of her husband,” Bonjorni recalls. “But she had a lot of spirit. Even though she was frightened, she didn’t come across as downtrodden or intimidated.”

Duncan Bonjorni agreed to represent Joann in a divorce proceeding. They would talk about money later.

Now in his mideighties, Bonjorni’s memory is impeccable.

Asked if Joann Hansen was attractive, he nodded. “Any man who still had a heartbeat would take a second look at her.”

“Were you interested in her romantically?” I asked him bluntly.

He shook his head. “No. But she needed someone to help her get away from Bob Hansen.”

With Bonjorni’s help, Joann filed preliminary papers seeking a divorce. She said she’d been married to Bob for more than five years, and gave her wedding date as April 1956. She might have fudged a year or it could have been only a typo in the document; Nick was born in November 1957.

Joann had signed a sort of prenuptial agreement back in the midfifties. The early agreement specified that, if they ever divorced, Bob would retain ownership of the four houses he’d bought before their union.

By 1962, there were more than fifteen properties, and his wealth had grown considerably. Joann hoped he would
let her have a house where she and their children could live, and that he would pay child support. She could get a part-time job if she had to.

Anything would be better than constantly living in fear, and worrying about how Bob’s rages were affecting Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty.

On May 2, Bonjorni filed Joann’s divorce complaint. The first sections listed known facts—date of marriage, names and birthdates of children, and their assets, which mainly consisted of the rental houses that Bob had purchased over the years. She had the Chevrolet Biscayne, and he had two trucks and $2,500 worth of tools and equipment. Their furniture was estimated at only $500.

Their property, however, was noted to be worth over $300,000—a very large amount in 1962. They had no debt except for mortgage payments, which were covered by rental payments.

Joann didn’t hold back when her reasons for seeking a divorce were presented to the court.

“[That] Defendant Robert M. Hansen has treated Plaintiff Joann E. Hansen with extreme cruelty, rendering her life burdensome, and making the continuance of this marriage no longer possible. That, in particular, Defendant has kicked, beat, and struck Plaintiff and threatened her life in the presence of witnesses. That Defendant regularly beats Plaintiff severely, and does so in front of the minor children of the parties hereto. That said beatings are without reason and provocation, and are severe enough to inflict large painful bruises, making it impossible for Plaintiff to sleep, and causing her to be in extreme pain and unable to
perform her usual duties and move about normally. That further, said Defendant beat and abused Plaintiff’s child by a prior marriage to the degree that she was forced to relinquish custody of said child to her former husband. That as a result of the actions of Defendant, Plaintiff has lost all love and affection for said Defendant, and it is no longer possible for parties hereto to live together as husband and wife, or at all.”

For more than five years, Joann had managed all of the Hansens’ rental properties and kept the books. Duncan Bonjorni told her that the original size of Bob Hansen’s estate had undoubtedly increased greatly in value due, in large part, to her efforts. She deserved to have an equitable distribution of their assets in any divorce settlement.

She also asked for a “full, absolute, complete decree of divorce,” custody of their children—with reasonable visitation rights for their father—support and education of the minor children until they came of age, the household furniture, her car, and attorneys’ fees.

Since Joann had no funds, Bonjorni asked for a temporary order giving her the Chevrolet Biscayne to drive, support and maintenance, the furniture, and the use of one of the many houses the couple owned.

In response, Bob pleaded poverty, saying that after he paid all of his mortgages each month, he only had $400 left from the rentals. But Joann, who had kept the records, knew he cleared $1,125 a month.

Bob Hansen hired his own attorney and fought Joann furiously over division of their assets. He harassed her constantly and made her life miserable. To upset her, he
gave lighted cigarettes to Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty—even though they were all under five.

In that summer of 1962, she had no real place to live. She took the children and went to visit one of her sisters in Spokane for a while. When she felt they might be overstaying their welcome, she moved back to Pat’s house.

Duncan Bonjorni helped Joann file a tougher restraining order meant to protect her if Bob should try to locate her. The order was issued on August 8, 1962, and Joann heaved a sigh of relief. Maybe she could get away from Bob and have a new life where she wasn’t afraid anymore.

She almost believed that was true. Today we have learned that restraining orders aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on as far as safety for the person who holds them. Yes, they can cause a stalker or angry spouse to be arrested if they disobey the orders, but many of them aren’t deterred. If a man—or a woman—is obsessed with someone, a court order doesn’t help. Too often, they make the stalker furious and their targets are in even more danger.

Joann and the children stayed at Patricia Martin’s house in Auburn for two weeks, weeks when she was able to relax a little. But it was a temporary measure. She knew she couldn’t hide from Bob forever, and he was sure to figure out where she was, anyway. Probably, he already knew. Joann wasn’t close to many people, but Pat had always been there to help her when things turned rocky. He would guess that she had run to Pat for shelter.