Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (24 page)

Forty-eight years later, Patricia Martin still feels guilty that she couldn’t do more to help her best friend. They sat
at Pat’s kitchen table, drank coffee, and smoked endless cigarettes, as they debated what Joann should do. Both of them were naive about restraining orders. Joann wanted so much to be back in her own home, and Bob owned plenty of houses where he could live.

The restraining order said she could go back to the large brown house in Des Moines. Bob was supposedly living in the smaller white house a few blocks away.

Pat urged Joann to go home—to live the way she deserved to live. “He’s not there, Joann,” she said. “You’ll see. You have made the first move to be free, and now you can build on that.”

Patricia Martin honestly felt that she was giving Joann the best advice possible. No one should live in hiding, afraid of shadows. After all, Joann had a restraining order.

One thing Pat has never forgotten—and it niggles at her. “Joann begged me to go home with her, and stay until she got the locks changed,” Pat says. “But I was too afraid of Bob. I knew he resented me for taking Joann’s side and giving her a place to run to.”

It was Friday, August 10, 1962. Joann had made plans with her mother and her three sisters to visit the World’s Fair in Seattle the next day. She really looked forward to being with them again. Bob had forbidden her to tell their three children that they
had
aunts and cousins and grandparents on their mother’s side. Her world had grown smaller and smaller, without her realizing how confining it was—until it was too late.

As Joann prepared to leave, Patricia Martin hugged her and Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty. They would be five, four, and three in three months.

“Joann had five dollars,” Pat remembers. “I know she wanted to buy some hair dye and she didn’t even have enough for that. So I gave her enough to make up the difference.”

Pat asked Joann to call her as soon as she got home. It wasn’t that far from Auburn to Des Moines. She watched them drive away, and then went inside to wait for Joann’s call.

“It was about forty-five minutes before she called me, and she said everything was okay—that she was ‘all right.’ She even thought it was probably a good decision for her to go home. She was feeling not so scared, and beginning to relax. We were both relieved …

“Suddenly, Joann said, ‘Pat! Wait a minute—’

“And then she said, ‘Oh, Pat! He’s in the basement! Oh, God—he’s here, he’s coming up—’”

Joann started screaming as if she was terrified, as Pat frantically asked her what was wrong.

“But then the phone went dead,” Pat remembers, and it’s obvious Pat is right back where she was forty-eight years ago.

Patricia Martin dialed Joann’s phone number, only to get a busy signal. She kept redialing, but for half an hour, no one answered.

After so many calls, Bob Hansen finally picked up the phone, his voice calm. Pat asked to speak to Joann.

“Stop that crap, Pat,” Bob said. “You know she’s with you.”

But, of course, she wasn’t. Joann Hansen was gone.

Pat wanted to call the police right away, but her husband discouraged her, explaining that adults couldn’t be reported as missing until they’d been gone for forty-eight hours. And she didn’t know which department to call. The King County Sheriff’s Office or the Des Moines Police Department.

As it turned out, even if she had filed a missing report on that Friday afternoon in August 1962, it probably would have made no difference.

Patricia Martin held
the tiniest hope that Joann Hansen had escaped and found some safe haven other than her own house and spent the night there. That seemed highly unlikely; Joann wouldn’t have let her worry all night without finding a way to check in.

And then there was the outing where Joann was supposed to meet her mother and her three sisters at the Seattle World’s Fair on that Saturday after her Friday disappearance. Joann had really been looking forward to that, especially since she didn’t get to see her family very often. Bob wanted nothing to do with her relatives, but the restraining order had given her the courage to arrange to meet them.

But they had gone to the designated spot where they were to meet on August 11. They waited and waited, and she didn’t show up. In case they had the time wrong, they kept returning to the meeting spot, but she was never there.

Patricia Martin didn’t know what to do. She called
Duncan Bonjorni and told him that she didn’t know what had happened to Joann and she feared for her safety.

Duncan called the King County Sheriff’s Office and persuaded them to send out an All Points Bulletin if Joann didn’t show up in twenty-four hours. Adults who disappear often do so because they want to leave, and police departments set a time period before they will act on a missing report—
unless
there are overt signs that the person has been injured such as blood, bullet holes, or signs of a struggle.

The brown house showed no signs that anything violent had happened there.

Although Pat’s husband was a police officer in Auburn, the last place Joann was known to be was in Des Moines.

Louie Malesis warned Pat that he doubted that any police department would investigate a case without a body.

She soon found that he was right. Indeed, the first time prosecutors in Washington State would win a case where there was no body of an alleged victim would be in 2000, almost forty years in the future. Even then, the victim had been missing for nine years before a gutsy prosecutor, Marilyn Brenneman, agreed to file murder charges against the husband of the missing woman. Brenneman won that landmark case. (See
Empty Promises: Ann Rule’s Crime Files
, Vol. 7.)

Patricia Martin was a woman on fire who refused to stand by and see Joann Hansen’s disappearance be ignored. She contacted the Des Moines Police Department, then located in the upstairs of an old wooden building owned by the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks
who occupied the first floor. There were only a handful of commissioned officers in the department in 1962.

When she tried to report Joann as a probable murder victim, she was told that the Des Moines police could not investigate a suspected homicide where there was no body to validate that a missing person had died of homicidal violence.

Next, she called the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
, one of Seattle’s two newspapers, a publication that was known for its probing investigative articles.

But Pat was stymied when a reporter told her that they could possibly write an “unsolved” murder case
if
there was a body. “Without a body, we can’t write anything,” he finished.

“I knew there was no place Joann could have gone,” Pat says today. “She had no money except for about six dollars and fifty cents. She loved her kids so much that nothing could have made her abandon them—nothing beyond her own death. She would have been so worried about what would happen to them if they were alone with Bob.”

Duncan Bonjorni was troubled when he heard from a young woman who had babysat with Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty the night their mother disappeared. She and a girlfriend had looked through Joann’s closet, admiring her clothes—especially a sparkling blue cocktail dress that had been one of Joann’s favorites.

“When the babysitter looked for that dress the next day,” Bonjorni recalls, “it was gone. I sometimes wonder if Bob put it on Joann after he killed her. No way to prove it, though.”

There was another possibility; perhaps the self-made widower had deliberately removed the cocktail dress, hoping it would validate his story that Joann had left him to run off and live the high life with another man.

Belatedly, Bob Hansen filed a missing person report on Joann on August 15. Joann had been gone five days, and he may have realized that spouses who don’t even attempt to find their missing mates become suspect in the eyes of law enforcement.

Weeks after she
disappeared, Joann’s Chevy Biscayne was located in the lower Queen Anne Hill neighborhood in Seattle. So there
was
something left behind, but it’s doubtful it was Joann who abandoned it. It was filthy and cluttered with junk, food wrappers, cigarette butts, and empty bottles. The windows were open and the interior was covered with dust. All the tires had gone flat.

“Joann kept her car immaculate,” Patricia Martin insists. “She would never have let it get in that condition.”

There were no usable fingerprints in the Chevrolet, nor was there any physical evidence that might have given the Western Washington Crime Lab something to examine with the tools they had in 1962. The use of DNA in solving crimes or identifying people was more than thirty years in the future, and there was no nationwide clearinghouse for fingerprints, nothing like the AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) structure that exists now. In a sense, 1962 was in the dark ages of forensic science.

More than likely, the suspect(s) in Joann’s disappearance had abandoned the car with keys in it, an open invitation to car thieves and/or joy riders.

Life went on in the brown house—without Joann. Bob hired the first of a series of babysitters to watch Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty.

“There were so many babysitters,” Ty remembers. “We had
tons
of babysitters, so many that I can’t possibly remember them all.”

Joann’s divorce action against Bob was still on Judge Story Birdseye’s docket, and November 21 was the date for hearing evidence.

By October 23, Bob Hansen had hired a new attorney and filed a cross-complaint for divorce. He signed an affidavit he gave to Duncan Bonjorni in which he disputed all of Joann’s claims in her May divorce filing.

He asserted: “The Plaintiff served her complaint upon me on or about the eighth day of August, 1962, and I thereupon voluntarily vacated the family residence. Shortly thereafter—on or about the tenth day of August, the Plaintiff disappeared, leaving the three minor children under [my care.] To present times, the Plaintiff has not reappeared, and the minor children have been maintained by me.

“The Plaintiff, Joann E. Hansen had, for some time prior to her disappearance, been nervous, upset, and distraught, and seemed discontented with our life, including our marital relationship. I repeatedly attempted to reconcile
any differences and maintain a wholesome and pleasant family relationship and environment. At no time did I give the Plaintiff any reason to be fearful for her well-being and safety, nor did I ever in any manner threaten the Plaintiff.

“The disappearance of Joann E. Hansen was most surprising and shocking to me. It was not until the preparation of statements of financial condition for the United States Treasury Internal Revenue Service that it came to my attention that the Plaintiff—who handled the collection of income from rental properties—had apparently withheld approximately $8,000, which funds were received and receipts written, but are unaccounted for in deposits made and were never in my hands.

“I believe that Joann E. Hansen is presently alive and upon her past actions, together with her emotional instability, I further believe that she chose to desert me and our three minor children for reasons known only to her to live elsewhere and not proceed with the divorce action.”

Putting a halo on his own head, Bob Hansen ended his affidavit by saying that he had been managing all the property involved and that his “prudent business acumen” had retained and/or increased the property values.

Since no one knew where Joann Hansen was, or even if she was alive or dead, Duncan Bonjorni decided to proceed with the divorce in absentia. He arranged for Donald Eide to serve as Guardian Ad Litem to represent Joann’s interests.

Legally, it didn’t matter that she wasn’t there to testify.

Superior Court Judge Story Birdseye said he found the divorce case between the Hansens interesting since Joann Hansen had disappeared shortly after she filed for divorce.

“Whether she is living or not, no one can say. If [Joann’s attorneys] discontinue their motion, the parties would remain married, and if Mr. Hansen dissipated the present community estate, leaving nothing for Mrs. Hansen when—and if—she returns, they might be subject to criticism.”

Judge Birdseye declared that he felt justified in concluding that Joann had suffered violence at her husband’s hands, and “sufficient personal indignities” to establish grounds for divorce.

“Accordingly, I will terminate the marriage by awarding a decree of divorce to the plaintiff.”

Bob Hansen had already withdrawn his cross-complaint for divorce.

The judge was in a difficult position. Since Joann Hansen was missing, he couldn’t award custody or visitation to her. Neither did he deny them. He said that they must all wait to see what Joann’s mental condition was if she ever came home.

As for the division of property, Judge Birdseye considered Bob’s demand for every single piece of property, all contracts, all vehicles, and the used furniture they had owned.

Donald Eide, speaking for Joann, asked for the small white house behind the veterinary clinic, the Willows
Apartments with the ten small rental units, a $3,000 contract on one rental house, and legal fees of less than $1,000 owed to Duncan Bonjorni.

Judge Birdseye ruled that the community estate—minus the mortgages and encumbrances Bob Hansen presented—was worth $70,000. Since Bob was raising Nick, Kandy Kay, and Tyler, he got 60 percent of the estate, and Joann was awarded 40 percent. Her share was $27,740, and it came as a lien against certain properties if Bob should sell them. In essence, she got a small house and a barn that was located on the Green River in Kent, Washington.

If Joann Hansen never returned, her share was to be held in trust for her children.

Patricia Martin maintains that if she could have, Joann would have shown up to get her share of the Hansen estate so she could take care of her kids.