Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (48 page)

Bob Hansen, 64, and his second wife, Cecilia, 21, in Costa Rica, posing next to a truckload of palm nuts.

Cecilia Hansen roller-skating in front of Bob Hansen’s home on Green River Road. She was tiny enough to be a child.

Cecilia in the kitchen of the yellow house in Auburn. Her marriage to Bob Hansen was coming to a close. She felt like a possession and he called her “MY Beauty.”

Flory Hansen, Bob’s third wife. She felt she should marry him because she “owed” him for building her parents a safe and sturdy home in Costa Rica.

Flory Hansen, basting salmon that Bob caught. Bob wouldn’t allow her to go beyond their property line without him. U.S. Immigration officers found out he’d brought her into the country illegally.

Flory standing in a burned-out forest on Blewett Pass in the Cascade Mountains in 2002.

Worth an estimated $5 million, Bob Hansen was alone now. He shows his age as he displays a king salmon in his yard in 2004. He was estranged from his sons and grandchildren, and he pinned his hopes on a new life in Costa Rica.

Bob Hansen’s last home was this simple rambler in Auburn, Washington—and not the new condo in Costa Rica.

Cindy Tyler and Ty Hansen, friends since junior high, worked together to solve the mystery of his mother’s disappearance almost fifty years earlier. The platonic friends cheered each other up when they ran into one frustration after another.

Kathleen Huget was helping a Realtor friend clean an empty house when she discovered eerie clues to a mystery of major proportions! She chose to fight for justice for a long-missing woman. (Huget Family Collection)

Left to right: Bobby (Joann’s son by her first marriage), Ty Hansen, and Nicole Hansen (after her transgender surgery). Ty and Nicole didn’t even know they had a half brother until Ty began to investigate his mother’s disappearance. They were happy to finally meet him, but they have once again lost touch and are trying to find him.

Ty Hansen promised his mother’s murder suspect, “I won’t stop until I find her bones!” Forty years after Joann Hansen vanished, he literally moved tons of earth looking for her remains. Radar imaging indicated there was something buried here.

A photo of Joann Hansen shortly before she vanished in August 1962. The shape of her face is mirrored in the artist’s rebuild of the woman’s skull found in Suncadia, an area where the chief suspect once hunted.