Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (28 page)

Nick wasn’t attracted to men; he was intrigued with what women thought and did. At parties, Nick always gravitated to circles where women were holding conversations.

Bob Hansen may have suspected what was going on with Nick—but he refused to acknowledge it. Of all men, Bob Hansen was the last one who could accept that his son was what was referred to as a “sissy boy.”

Bob was all man, strong, virile, powerful. But he once caught his elder son trying on some female clothes. And he was enraged.

Ty recalls seeing his father burn a dress when he and Nick were in junior high, but he knew better than to ask questions.

Although Nick didn’t suffer from beatings nearly as much as Ty did, this incident brought him a bruising.

Bob Hansen wanted sons who were athletes, sportsmen, and hunters. He wanted them to be womanizers, as he was, and took every opportunity to impress upon them that women weren’t as good as men and never could be. He would have preferred to have both Ty and Nick follow him into the construction business. Neither of them did, despite all the years that he trained them in every aspect of buying land, carpentry, painting, and how to treat tenants.

Bob had also wanted his daughter to be Miss America. But, tragically, when she failed to get to the top of the pageants she entered, Kandy Kay had turned to drugs.

In the end, Bob Hansen’s determination to have absolute control over his offspring only drove them away from him.

He had expected them to burnish
his
image, and found that they had dreams of their own.

The part of
the marital estate Joann had been awarded in the divorce proceedings where she had never appeared was supposed to be kept in trust for her children. It would have helped all of them when they came of age at eighteen. They needed it to pay for their educations, to find housing where they didn’t have to bend to their father’s will, and/or to start businesses.

But Bob Hansen met with lawyers who cleverly prevented the release of those trust funds. Kandy Kay might have received some property—but his sons got nothing. Somehow Joann’s share of the estate came back to Bob. His first attorney, James Gooding, was later shot to death in his Kent office by an angry tenant in one of
his
properties.

At that time Bob had already regained possession of the barn on the Green River and the Valley Apartments, built with the same plans as the Willows. The units sat next to the new freeway in Kent and ended up among
Bob’s assets along with the other properties. They were literally a stone’s throw from the river.

In his fifties now, Bob Hansen had a lot of money—some estimated his wealth at more than $5 million. As far as anyone knew for sure, he hadn’t remarried after Joann went out of his life, but that may be inaccurate. In the late seventies and early eighties, he was extremely interested in dating. He joined Parents Without Partners and met a number of women there. Of course, they didn’t suit him because he didn’t want any woman with an independent streak. He was annoyed to find that even the loneliest and least attractive of the single women in PWP seemed to be buying into equal rights for women.

Bob Hansen’s hair was still thick, and it was gray only at the temples. He was in shape. His three kids were out of his house and he felt free; he was ready to begin to enjoy life. He joined a number of social clubs in addition to Parents Without Partners, including the San Juan Club. Good-looking men were exceptionally popular at PWP; there were far more single women than men.

But Bob’s reputation preceded him. As handsome, tall, and rich as he was, most women still didn’t care for him after a date or two.

Bob Hansen did, however, meet other middle-aged to elderly men, his “wingmen” at PWP, who told him that there were countries where pretty women—
young
women—were looking for well-to-do American men to marry. And they weren’t bossy or demanding.

Bob was intrigued by the possibilities.

He had done a great deal of traveling in the continental United States: hunting, fishing, backpacking on horses and mules, and visiting many of the top tourist attractions.

In January 1980, he was fifty-six when he signed on for a seventeen-day luxury sailing trip on the barkentine
Polynesia
. The ship was 248 feet long and traveled to the Leeward Islands in the West Indies: St. Maarten, Anguilla, Saba, St. Barts, St. Kitts, and Statia. Bob was even allowed to steer the craft on a calm day and received a huge, flowery certificate memorializing his prowess.

From the West Indies, Bob went to Cancún, Mexico. As always, he took dozens of photographs, and posed for as many, filling still more scrapbooks. He felt comfortable in tropical climates, and he thoroughly enjoyed the many trips he embarked upon. The staff of the
Polynesia
served food, hors d’oeuvres, canapes, and liquor—anything he wanted—all free.

To the surprise of his children, Bob also began to organize Hansen family reunions, planning all the details, sending out invitations to even distant relatives. He even dug the roasting pit and oversaw the slow baking of large hogs.

He had never been a particularly social man but he now seemed to be trying to surround himself with people. Maybe he was softening, although Ty, particularly, doubted it.

“I think he realized that he didn’t have many friends and that his kids were pulling away from him,” Ty tried to explain. “But all of a sudden, he was into finding all of our
relatives—not my mother’s family, of course, but Hansens. Our immediate family was so dysfunctional—maybe he was looking for a family.”

In their early twenties, Nick, Kandy, and Ty sometimes accompanied their father to the Hansen and Danish reunions in eastern Washington. Bob posed for photos with everyone there and took pictures of people who may or may not have been related to him.

The picnic tables were groaning boards filled with both picnic and Danish food: whole roasted pigs, fried chicken livers, little Danish open-faced sandwiches (
smorrebrod
), chicken and dumplings, pies, cakes, pastries, and peaches and grapes.

One of Bob’s favorite parts of these reunions was the magnificent rolling wheat fields of the Palouse on the far eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. A distant cousin grew acres of wheat, and Bob was enthralled by the giant threshing machines needed to harvest it. Ty and Nick also enjoyed driving the combines in the golden fields.

Bob Hansen seemed somehow to be starting over, trying to create an extended family where he actually belonged, perhaps even trying to draw his children closer as they struggled to be free of him. They had been burdens for him, but now he was facing old age and he had no one close to him.

Marv Milosevich was the closest person Bob knew in terms of friendship, although Marv didn’t realize it at the time. He himself had dozens of good friends and family members. It would be a long time before Marv came to
the realization that he was probably Bob’s
best
friend. He hadn’t known how isolated the older man was.

Marv tried to see a good side to Bob because he was grateful for all that Bob had taught him.

“Some of the things he told me,” Marv says with a laugh, “I didn’t want to emulate. LaVonne and I had about fifty-two rentals by then and they were quite a bit nicer than Bob’s rentals. He told me, ‘Don’t get close with your renters! Don’t be friends with them, whatever you do.’ But we chose to treat our renters well, and it worked out fine.”

Bob was dealing with being alone. Nick was far away in the navy, Ty was selling used cars on Old 99, and Kandy was living with Tom Yarbrough in Wendover, Utah. Bob Hansen didn’t hear from any of them very often.

He’d lost his brother to kidney cancer in February 1981, when Ken died in his sleep. Ken Hansen was only fifty-eight and his death made Bob realize that life was shorter than it had seemed when he’d been a young man.

Nick Hansen had gone to see his uncle Ken less than a week before he’d died. The retired police officer advised him to do and be what he wanted in life, and it made an impression on Nick. Ken Hansen had had a fulfilling life with his law enforcement career, and Aunt Lorene and Nick’s cousins had made Ken’s home life happy, too.

Nick wanted so much to live the life he only imagined, and Ken’s kindness helped him.

Bob Hansen continued his travels throughout the eighties, searching for a place where he could live in the sun; he was tired of the rain that fell on Seattle most of the winter. He looked for a country where his money would last longer, as well as a place where he could find a lovely, docile woman to live with. He informed Ty that he would keep a small “pad” in the Northwest, but he didn’t intend to spend much time there.

After all his searching for a spot he could truly call home, it was Costa Rica that called out the most seductive siren song to Bob Hansen. He found it was indeed true that many young women there wanted to be married to wealthy Americans.

And so, in the mideighties in Costa Rica, Bob Hansen discovered what, for him, was paradise.

He met a number of beautiful, dark-haired women in their late teens and early twenties.

“He brought home a different girl every year for four years,” LaVonne Milosevich says. “They were very young and pretty. I remember there were
two
Cecilias.”

Most of the young women chose to return to Costa Rica, but Bob eventually settled on the second Cecilia, who was twenty-one, slender and petite, and quite lovely. They were married and he took her home with him. They traveled extensively in America: to Alaska, Montana, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and scores of attractions in Washington State. Everywhere they went, Bob had Cecilia pose in front of whatever oddity or scenic view was displayed—from looking at livestock at the state fair in Puyallup to standing high atop the windmill on
Bob’s barn. He rarely identified her by name, but when he did write something in the scrapbook of Cecilia’s era, he scribbled simply “MY Beauty.”

Cecilia was so tiny that even with her black hair piled atop her head, she could stand under Bob’s outstretched arm.

There are few people who can give details about what happened to Bob’s second marriage. It lasted only a few years, and Cecilia returned to Costa Rica. She divorced Bob.

In the spring
of 1986, Kandy began to dabble in prescription drugs, thinking that she was in no danger of sliding back into addiction. She told herself that amphetamines and tranquilizers couldn’t hook her the way heroin had. When Tom found out, he was very concerned and they argued. She had gone through hell getting straight, and he couldn’t bear to see her slip.

Their disagreements were strong enough that she told Tom she was going back to Washington for a while to visit her brother. She wasn’t leaving Tom; she just needed time to think and get her head together.

She called Ty and arranged for him to pick her up at Sea-Tac Airport on April 2.

As far as Ty could see, his older sister was clean and healthy when she returned to Des Moines. They stopped to eat dinner at a small, popular restaurant on Old Highway 99, and they had a good time talking and catching up. Ty hoped that Kandy intended to go back to Tom and
weave together the tears in their relationship, but he didn’t preach. He listened.

“We made plans to get together the next day,” Ty recalls. “And I dropped her off at the Three Bears Motel on the highway at S. 216th Street.”

The Three Bears was a familiar stopover near Des Moines for decades, but by 1986 it—along with several other moderately priced motels on the highway—attracted young prostitutes and their pimps.

And the Green River Killer was active along Old 99 then, too. His targets were teenage girls, many of them who stayed at the string of motels from S. 142nd to S. 240th Street. Ty wasn’t really concerned; Kandy was in her hometown, she was twenty-seven, and she was quietly self-confident. Nevertheless, he updated her about the serial killer who roamed anonymously up and down the highway and reminded her to check the peephole in her door before she let anyone in.

When Kandy didn’t call Ty by noon the next day, he was a little worried. He’d expected that his sister would sleep late; she’d been tired after her flight from Utah, but now it was afternoon.

Wondering if she might have turned her phone’s ringer off, Ty drove the short distance to the Three Bears Motel. He saw a few police units outside, but didn’t think much about it; they could be meeting for coffee. He began to feel a cold chill only when the front desk attendant at the motel gave him a peculiar look. He answered Ty’s question about which room Kandy was in and pointed down the walkway.

Ty walked faster down the corridor. As he approached Kandy’s room, he saw several police officers standing in the doorway and in the hall. He identified himself as he maneuvered into a position where he could peer into the room.

And he saw the sister he loved, the sister for whom he’d held out so much hope, lying perfectly still on the bed.

The police officers and paramedics shook their heads when Ty urged them to save her. It was far too late.

Kandy Kay Hansen had been clean and straight, and yet samples of body fluids taken at her autopsy for testing indicated that she had died of an overdose of black tar heroin. It had been administered subcutaneously. It wasn’t hard to find along the Sea-Tac Strip, and being back in that milieu may have tempted Kandy. After years free of heroin, she had succumbed to a fatal temptation.

In the end, it didn’t seem to matter how Kandy had gotten the heroin. She was dead and nothing would bring her back. Kandy was hours beyond saving when a maid had discovered her body.

Ty Hansen cannot even remember what he did when he was in that first numb grip of shock. He thinks he notified Tom Yarbrough, or, at least, had someone else let him know that Kandy was gone. (He did call Tom, who sent a mass of flowers and a note of everlasting love for Kandy Kay to her funeral services.)