Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (32 page)

The laundry room, too, was added to the proposed radar search.

There would be four “digs” that followed this first attempt on October 7, 2003.

Bernard Housen worked from a scale map drawn to the dimensions of the area to be searched. Fifty-three transect lines were run so that any finding could be triangulated and both suspicious anomalies and benign anomalies located could be marked on the map.

A GSSI SIR 2000 Ground Penetrating Radar unit with a 400 MHz antenna would be used to detect data. Working between four large steel nails that were placed in the ground to mark the corners of the site, Housen dragged the antenna along the surface of each transect line. He walked at a slow but steady pace.

Would he find an anomaly that proved to be Joann Hansen’s bones? The conditions were perfect for the GPR search and both benign and unknown objects showed up.

Housen found three areas of “disturbed soil anomalies” from two to four feet below the cement barn floor pad.

“Areas A, B, and E are all consistent in depth and size to represent a clandestine grave site.”

He warned, however, that there might be other causes for disturbed soil—such as the removal of stumps or rocks.

A GPR search of the Valley Apartments’ laundry room showed some similar findings. The concrete slab floor was inordinately thick for a laundry area—two to three feet. It had no rebar to stabilize it.

The only way to be sure of what lay beneath the old barn floor or the laundry room was to dig, take core samples, and bring in cadaver dogs. Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler were prepared to do that, even if they had to do the shoveling themselves.

Twice, Ty used an excavator to explore the area under S. 251st Street, digging six-foot chunks out of the dirt beneath the road.

He found nothing.

With fellow volunteers, Cindy Tyler and Ty began to cut through the cement slab in the Valley Apartments’ laundry area and the lawn outside.

“When Ty and I started digging there,” Cindy recalls, “both Detective Jim Allen and deputy prosecutor Jeff Baird grabbed shovels and joined us.

“There was a moment when I almost lost it,” she says, “when someone found a large bone. I really thought we had found Joann and I started to cry. They had a sheriff’s patrol car standing by and the bone was rushed downtown for the medical examiner’s office to check it out.

“But it wasn’t Joann; it was an animal bone. Eventually, we found so many animal bones, and every time we hoped we might have solved the mystery of where Ty’s mother was.

“We didn’t find her at the Valley Apartments, but we sure made a mess of the lawn,” Cindy said. “My brother, Russ Tyler, went back there with grass seed to try to bring it back to the way it was.”

From 2003 to 2005, the backbreaking work of exploring the earth for some sign of Joann Hansen continued. Luckily, there were many volunteers who joined Cindy and Ty in their sad project, ready to dig with shovels. They didn’t have enough money to rent machines that would drill and then lift cores of dirt and “anomalies” out of the ground. Neither did the King County budget.

It was no wonder that both Ty and Cindy were burned out in their frustrating goal to find Joann and give her a proper burial where those who loved her could visit her and place flowers on her grave.

But, like phoenixes rising from the ashes, they always found new energy to continue.

Stymied by all
the blocked pathways he had encountered, Ty Hansen had something else he needed to do. That was to confront his father with what he believed to be the truth. If he never found his lost mother, at least he could tell his father that he
knew
finally that she had never deliberately left him and his siblings. He wanted to get that message to the old man and accuse him of her murder.

He tried to do that in 2005 and 2006, but Bob turned a deaf ear and swore at him, threatening to call police if Ty didn’t get off his property.

And then it was early in 2008.

Ty entered Bob Hansen’s phone number into his cell phone and hit “talk.” He heard an almost endless ringing before it went to voice mail. He wondered if his father had caller ID and was deliberately avoiding talking with him. He might be sitting there, listening. Maybe he had the kind of answering machine where he could hear his callers leave a message.

Ty was determined to have his say; if he had to leave
a message instead of confronting the old man, he would do that. He had missed the “beep” while debating what he should do, and he quickly redialed, and this time he began to speak when he heard the shrill tone.

“I know our mother never left us on purpose,” Ty said. “I know you killed her—and I’m going to prove it.

“You hid her somewhere,” Ty said evenly. “You murdered her way back in 1962. What did you do with her body?”

There was only silence on the other end of the line.

“I won’t stop until I find her bones!” Ty shouted, before he hung up. “Not until I find her bones!”

That explained one of the yellow notes that Kathleen Huget found tacked to Bob’s wall, the one that baffled her the most.

The frightened old man listening to that message wrote those words on a yellow note:

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

Bob Hansen was growing more paranoid, perhaps even having waking nightmares as many elderly people do. He had printed another note in late August:

“2 MEN IN BACKYARD. THEY RAN AND JUMPED BACK FENCE—ONE GUY DROPPED BACKPACK.”

Ty Hansen had
begun his quest full of resentment and rage. He was angry that he had lost his mother so early that he couldn’t even remember her, angry at the physical and mental abuse he had suffered at his father’s hands. He wanted some kind of justice, an ending to the lies about Joann that would avenge his mother—but he also wanted to punish his father. He may not have thought about this aspect of his crusade when he set out.

There came a point, however, when Ty realized that it wasn’t all about him and his pain and loss. He was nearing fifty now. In a way, he had come to know the pretty dark-haired woman who had undoubtedly perished when she was much younger than he was. Through her friends who had never forgotten her, Ty’s blurry picture of his mom began to fill in and take shape. He realized that she had lost far more than he had.

“And I also saw that my mother’s disappearance had hurt so many people and changed their lives, and not for
the better. I certainly didn’t give up trying to find out the truth, but I wasn’t just thinking about myself any longer.

“I guess, in that moment, I finally grew up.”

Bob Hansen’s eighty-fourth birthday was on October 13, 2008. Ty told Cindy that he wanted to go see his father.

Even though Bob hadn’t threatened Cindy when she knocked on his door, she was worried about what he might do when he saw Ty. He’d had nothing to do with either Ty or Nicole for years, and she had seen his delight in criticizing both of his sons during the hour she’d spent with him.

Like everyone else who either knew Bob or knew of his reputation for violence, she was afraid for Ty.

But Ty was adamant. Bob Hansen’s birthday fell on a Monday, and the two of them drove to Auburn. Alongside the road, the vine maples were scarlet and the big leaf maples golden as they neared the town where Bob lived.

They parked a few doors down the street from the neat yellow house that was now Bob’s “pad” in America when he wasn’t in Costa Rica. But when Ty knocked on the door, there was no answer—and there was no vehicle in the driveway.

Ty sensed that time was running out for his father. “I had gone through several of the first stages of grief by then,” he recalls. “I was probably at a point of acceptance that my mother was dead, and I would still look for her, but I guess I wanted a final word with my father, some kind of peaceful conversation.”

They waited for a long time; Ty was convinced his father was living there and determined to wait until he got home.

“I didn’t realize then how frightened Cindy really was to be there.”

More than an hour later, Bob Hansen’s Toyota 4Runner came down the street and turned into his driveway, coasting into the garage.

After the old man crawled awkwardly out of the driver’s seat, he went to the back of his SUV and was rummaging around, looking for something. Ty, followed by a nervous Cindy, walked up and they were standing behind him as he closed the rear hatch.

Bob Hansen was caught off guard as he turned around, shocked to see Ty.

“I want to talk to you,” Ty said, and Bob turned away from him.

His father had grown very old, and he seemed afraid.

“Dad!” Ty called. “I forgive you. Do you hear me? I forgive you!”

The elderly man slowed down only slightly.

“I hope you can forgive me?” Ty shouted. He didn’t regret his long hunt to find out what had happened to his mother, or feel guilty about contacting the sheriff. At the same time he realized that it must be hard on the old man.

Ty was torn, pulled in two directions. He and Nick had worked with their dad when they were younger, they’d learned things from him—if not ethics, then skills that they’d been able to use.

The vacations and trips had been fun once in a while—even though they never quite got over waiting for their
father to get mad about something. Kandy Kay was gone, and Nicole had a completely different life. Ty’s uncle Ken was gone.

“What I would have given to have a father like my uncle Ken,” Ty lamented. “He was a really good man.”

Ty still didn’t trust his father; he still believed that his father had destroyed his mother—and he didn’t want to spend time with him. He didn’t want anything from him. But he hated the idea that one of them would die full of hate.

“Dad,” Ty called again, “can you forgive me?”

Bob Hansen half-turned toward Ty, and his son could see hatred in his eyes. He brought his hand up and brusquely signaled with it in a dismissive gesture.

“Get the hell off my property!” Bob snarled. “You son of a bitch!”

Cindy tugged at Ty’s arm and urged him to come back to their car. Bob had always had a lot of guns and ammunition in his houses, and there was no telling what he might do.

For an instant, the world stood still—and then Bob limped toward his house and disappeared. For Ty, there was a measure of satisfaction. His father had always forbidden them to mention their mother’s name to him. And now the old man had had no choice but to hear Ty’s angry accusations. Would it have any impact on him?

It was over so quickly. Ty hadn’t said everything he wanted to, and he knew he might never know what his father’s reaction was.

Marv Milosevich, however, heard about the confrontation between Ty and Bob.

“Bob told me that Ty scared him to death,” Marv said when interviewed. “Bob said, ‘I thought he was going to kill me.’”

Ty had no intention of killing his father, but he wanted some justice for his mother. He had frightened Bob, long after the years when he had been terrified by his father.

Later, Ty tried once more to speak to his father but was unsuccessful. “Whenever I’d come up to Washington State, I’d make it a point to drive by his house,” Ty recalls. “I didn’t feel there was any chance of talking to my dad, but I wanted him to see my car go by and know that I hadn’t given up trying to find what had happened to our mother.”

The encounter on his birthday only served to convince Bob Hansen that he needed to move to Costa Rica for good as soon as possible. He contacted an attorney in Washington and asked him to do research on how he could become a Costa Rican citizen.

He planned to take all his assets with him and hide them in Costa Rica.

Bob thought it would be far easier than it was. Bizarrely—since he didn’t trust either of his living children—Bob had made friends with an American couple who had become Costa Rican citizens decades earlier. Herb Stuart* and his wife, Lily,* were about the age of Ty and Nicole, and they seemed to dote on the aging man. He had known them for twenty-five years.

But Costa Rican officials made immigration more and more difficult, and the Stuarts assured Bob that they could
be his sponsors so he could achieve citizenship in Costa Rica.

But Herb Stuart said it would take money. Lots of money.

Although Bob usually kept his financial business close to his vest, Marv Milosevich believes Bob advanced as much as half a million dollars to the Stuarts. Either they told him or he had heard somewhere that it would take that much to prove his good faith to the proper government offices.

When Marv Milosevich heard that, he attempted to warn Bob that it sounded fishy to him. “I spent an hour and a half drinking coffee with Herb Stuart when he came up here,” Marv said. “Apparently, he had told Bob that he had to prove to the Costa Rican government that he had enough funds to take care of himself so he wouldn’t be a burden on his chosen country. Herb figured it had to be at least a million dollars. He told me that he and his wife were going to be Bob’s ‘personal advocates.’

“In my opinion, that guy was a con man, and Bob fell for it. I tried to warn him but he trusted Herb Stuart.”

Bob Hansen wasn’t the kind of immigrant that most countries would covet. There was still the mystery of the missing girl who’d gone hiking with him, and although he never served more than overnight jail time—including the sentence (then) Judge Duncan Bonjorni gave him—Bob had a record of numerous arrests in the Northwest. Most of them stemmed from fights where he’d physically hurt people or destroyed property.

He was required to present many documents to validate statements he’d given Costa Rican officials. He scrambled
to get his birth certificate and proof of his place of birth in Junction City, Oregon, and he filled out a number of forms that he sent to the capital in Salem. He asked that his documentation be taken care of with all possible speed.