Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (33 page)

Hansen also contacted the Washington State Patrol offices to obtain a record of any rap sheet of arrests he might have. He seemed to luck out there; his record came back clean. It wasn’t luck, however. Bob had cleverly changed his answers on the WSP form. He gave his birthday as October 16, 1924, instead of October 13, 1924. He also changed his name slightly—from Robert Milton Hansen to Robert Melvin Hansen.

The WSP report said that they had not found any felony offense under that
exact
birth date and
exact
name.

Whether Bob Hansen had any proof that Herb and Lily Stuart had actually
given
the half-million dollars he said he’d sent them to immigration authorities in Costa Rica—or not—nobody knows. Marv Milosevich doubts that they did.

Robert Milton Hansen had hurt people in one way or another all his life. Suddenly,
his
world was crumbling.

His efforts to get into Costa Rica as a citizen came to nothing. Officials there refused his application, and much of his fortune was gone. Nevertheless, he drew up a will leaving everything he owned—including his house—to Herb and Lily Stuart! It would be his final revenge on his sons.

But it wouldn’t be a surprise. Ty had known for decades that he and Nick would get nothing in their father’s will,
just as the money set aside for them to collect on their eighteenth birthdays from their mother’s estate had disappeared. They had both accepted that long ago.

“He really had no one else to leave his assets to,” Ty says. “He had planned to leave them to Marv Milosevich, but he got mad at Marv over something.”

At last, at eighty-three, Bob Hansen had begun to ponder his own mortality. He had a few of the ailments that came with old age—various aches and pains—but he was basically healthy and still quite strong, strong enough to walk along the Green River for miles every day, picking up trash. He had, however, stopped hunting and fishing.

He had no one to go with him to pursue the blood sports he had enjoyed for much of his life.

“When I get old,” he once told Marv Milosevich, “I’m not gonna go to one of them rest homes. You sit in a chair, and they don’t take care of you. I’m gonna go my own way—kill myself.”

“That’d be hard to do, Bob,” Marv said cautiously.

“I can manage it—I’ve made up my mind.”

Since the midnineties, Bob had begun to doubt his own mind. He was forgetting things. To cover up for that, he kept a kind of journal, most pages riddled with misspellings, which Kathleen Huget found. There were also the yellow notes on the walls of his house. He jotted down miscellaneous bits of information—things he’d heard on
60 Minutes
or Fox News.

“Gold—Highest in 62 years”

“Ford Will Give Buyout to 75,000 employees—from $40,000 to $140,000”

“Venezuela’s President called Bush a ‘Diablo’—Devel”

“FEEMA is paying eleven million dollars per night for hotel rooms in Louisiana for flood victims”

“CATHOLIP BISHOP: No stem cell research, no abortions, no condoms or birth control devices”

There were scores of notations that seemed to have no pattern, although Hansen focused on countries that controlled oil, elderly celebrities who had died, war, disaster—and occasionally, sex transgender operations. He was either trying to keep his mind alert and current or he was writing down items because he had no one to talk to.

When Flory was still with him, he listed resorts and trip destinations, along with the names of high-priced hotels and motels.

He studied his notes constantly, trying to build muscles in his memory.

Hansen also wrote precise lists of things he had to accomplish, particularly when he was preparing for a visit to Costa Rica. One list had thirty-eight reminders for everything from “Put money in checking account to cover expenses while I’m gone,” to “Unplug refrigerator and freezer—Put rocks in door.”

What purpose rocks in the refrigerator doors served is obscure.

Bob Hansen was an intelligent man but a lousy speller. Some of his notes are laughable because of that. He wrote “VIAGRA—Pills for sex—Impudence [
sic
] Drug.”

When he commented on President Bill Clinton’s disastrous affair, he wrote “Monica Luinsky or Levinsky, Clinton’s Lover.”

Hansen also kept track in his journals of how many fish Marv Milosevich had caught. He did not list his own tally of fish.

From the time he was a young man, he’d kept precise listings of every penny he had spent on the women in his life. Bob Hansen had always considered that they “owed him” for the food they ate and the secondhand clothes he bought them.

The year 2008 was coming to an end. Marv and LaVonne Milosevich talked about asking Bob to come for Christmas dinner, but knowing that he would put a pall over the festivities, they kept putting the decision on that aside. Finally, they decided not to.

Bob Hansen had finally run out of friends—except for Lily and Herb Stuart in Costa Rica. His estate, estimated to be worth $5 million, would reward
them
for standing by him. Hansen’s will specifically said that his wife, Joann Cooper Morrison Hansen, had left him, and it was worded in such a way that even if she should ever resurface, he wanted her to have
nothing.
His children were also disinherited in the will.

Later, Marv felt guilt about that last Christmas, but he had also become tremendously disappointed in his one-time mentor, the man he had tried valiantly to remain friends with. The meanness in Bob Hansen had only intensified
as he had grown older, and there were few comfortable moments to be spent with him.

Bob was a racist, a miser, a misanthrope, the living image of Ebenezer Scrooge, a white supremacist, and a latter-day Nazi. He continued to blame everyone but himself for his misery. Maybe it had started when he was a little boy—when he had to go with his father to the dreaded Stump Farm, or for some other reason no one knew about.

It is said that in old age, we become who we were when we were young—only more so. Happy people are fun to be around even when they are long past social security age, and angry people are as sour as dill pickles when they are elderly.

In his almost eighty-four years, Bob Hansen had become only more paranoid and resentful of others.

On Tuesday morning
, August 4, 2009, the neighborhood on 14th Avenue in Auburn was very quiet. Forty-seven years earlier plus six days, Joann Hansen had disappeared. Perhaps the date had some meaning for Bob Hansen. Possibly, he had chosen this day at random.

His next-door neighbor finished his breakfast and realized that he hadn’t heard the familiar “ooga-ooga” of Bob’s antique automobile horn.

He walked the ten or twelve feet next door and could see that the garage windows were fogged over. When he found a clear spot to look inside, he saw Bob Hansen sitting as still as death behind the steering wheel of his car. He knew instantly that Bob hadn’t died of a stroke or heart attack; he had died the way he’d once told Marv Milosevich he’d chosen.

By his own hand. With the help of carbon monoxide. His skin was the characteristic bright cherry red that appears when carbon monoxide shuts off oxygen in the blood.

Some might say that Robert Milton Hansen’s death was a prime example of “What goes around, comes around.”

His life had ended in ashes. He was alone in an empty house and he had alienated everyone who might have been there for him when he was an old man.

Hansen would never achieve his dream of starting life over in Costa Rica with a new young woman. That country had barred him as a candidate for citizenship. The luxurious condo he had furnished lavishly wouldn’t be his home—ever.

But he had avoided living in a nursing home.

He had told Marv Milosevich that he would go out of this world in his own way. He had accomplished that bleak ambition; his final act ensured that he was in control. Or was he? The chilling aspect of suicide by carbon monoxide is that, at a certain point, the brain is still active—but the subject cannot move. If Bob Hansen had changed his mind partway through his suicide plan, paralysis would have already overtaken his body.

There had been no going back.

There was little of any value in Bob Hansen’s last house. Everything was secondhand, worn, and cheap. Hansen’s yellow notes and his journals remained—on almost all of them he’d written about mundane things: reminders, his opinions, scraps and bits of disorganized news left behind for strangers to find.

Ty, Nicole Hansen, and Cindy Tyler removed only the stacks of photo albums that Bob had kept since he was twenty. There were faded pictures of their mother in some of them, and photos of themselves as babies and in their
growing-up years. They could all see Joann’s tenderness toward her babies; it was something to hold on to.

There were forty times as many photographs of Bob posing with dead animals, birds, and fish—his trophies from sixty or more years of hunting and fishing.

That was his legacy.

This was the house that Kathleen Huget had walked into a few weeks later, the rooms where she would “hear” both a silent cry for help and a sense of looming rage and danger.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Kathleen had shouted into the empty rooms, and her voice didn’t tremble at all. “I’m not afraid of you! You don’t scare me, and you can’t hurt me!”

Initially, she knew nothing about the man who had lived and died in this house, but the eerie presence of evil she sensed couldn’t be denied.

The Realtor friend of Kathleen’s had told her she could have anything she found in the house. A lot of it was usable if not new. She neither needed nor wanted it, but she didn’t feel as if she could just take it to the dump.

“I had an estate sale,” she said. “I figured if there was any profit, I could give it to charity.”

Lots of people showed up on the day of the sale. Sophisticated bargain hunters soon moved on after they saw that there were no precious antiques or collectors’ items in the yellow rambler in Auburn.

“But there were poor people who came,” Kathleen recalls. “There were quite a few migrant workers in the area during harvest season in August and September. Most of
them were barely making it. They were so happy to find six pairs of socks for a dollar, or a table for fifteen dollars. Before long, I cut the prices in half. An old bed meant so much to them, or some dishes that didn’t match. Some of them called relatives and they came to the sale, too. In the end, I was giving things away, and it was a wonderful experience to see how grateful they were.”

Having heard of Bob Hansen’s stinginess and his scorn for anyone who gave to charitable causes, Kathleen admits that she took a certain satisfaction as she virtually donated all his possessions to people who basically had nothing.

“I knew he would have hated my doing that,” she said with a smile. “He never believed in helping poor people, and now they were driving and walking away with the things he’d left behind, with their little kids jumping up and down with excitement.”

Ty had attempted
to file a lawsuit against his father in 2006, believing that the only thing that might get the old man’s attention would be to threaten his bank account.

“I didn’t want his money,” Ty says, “but I wanted to honor my mother, to somehow let her know that we were still fighting for her. We had run out of money to hire excavators and bulldozers in our search for her remains. If we could finally get the inheritance that our mother had left us, we could keep on looking for her. But I couldn’t find a lawyer who would take my case.”

The Christmas season was in full swing in late November 2009, and Bob Hansen had been dead for four months when Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler finally located an attorney who would represent Ty and Nicole.

Dean Brett, a Bellingham lawyer, agreed to file a wrongful death suit on behalf of Joann Hansen’s estate.

It seemed a unique legal situation. Their surviving children were suing on behalf of their mother, dead for almost five decades, against their father, also deceased.

A King County judge had ruled in 1969 that Joann Cooper Hansen was legally dead—even though her body had never been found. By 1975, thirteen years had passed with not one sign of her. Nor had her remains surfaced by 2009, despite the determined hunt kept alive by Ty Hansen and Cindy Tyler.

Sergeant John Urquhart, spokesman for the King County Sheriff’s Office, said that as far as his department was concerned, Joann’s case had remained open in 1975. “And it remains open today.”

Urquhart said that Bob Hansen had, indeed, been a person of interest in Joann’s disappearance, but that sheriff’s detectives had never been able to find enough evidence to file murder charges against him.

“At the time Joann Hansen disappeared,” Sergeant Urquhart added, “missing persons cases weren’t pursued as vigorously as they are today.”

So many people had been afraid of Bob Hansen, and Ty and Cindy hoped that frightened witnesses might feel safe enough to come forward now that he was dead. Someone, somewhere, had to have information—no matter how slight it might be—that could be tied with what
was
known to finally weave a net that would incriminate Bob. He couldn’t be tried in regular court now, but he might be facing a higher judgment beyond life.

If her children could bury Joann’s earthly remains in a cemetery with a headstone, it would mean the world to them.

No amount of money could ever compensate Joann’s children for the loss of their mother when they were only toddlers, nor could it erase the pain and suffering she had endured in her brutal marriage and in her sad anticipation of her own death.

Local papers in Seattle and in adjoining counties carried the story of the bizarre lawsuit. Forty-seven years later, the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
did cover the mystery of Joann Hansen’s disappearance. KOMO-TV, the ABC affiliate in Seattle, heard from the network headquarters in New York after they did a comprehensive overview of Ty and Nicole Hansen’s suit against their late father.