Don't Look Behind You and Other True Cases (34 page)

“Would Ty Hansen be willing to be interviewed by Chris Hansen (no relation) regarding the lawsuit he had filed?”

Of course Ty would! He had done his best to gain publicity that might reach someone who knew something about his mother. Her photographs and the history of the case were registered on the Doe Network, a successful clearinghouse for missing persons and unidentified bodies in America. Joann’s face—as she had looked in 1962—was also on posters and fliers sent out by smaller organizations dedicated to locating the lost souls who had never come home.

Chris Hansen, famous as the NBC reporter who meets internet stalkers looking for underaged girls and boys on
To Catch a Predator
, conducted an interview with a man with the same last name. They were not related. Chris and Ty Hansen were almost the same age, in their early fifties.

Ty explained that he had always been told his mother deliberately left their family, and he had only become
suspicious when he read his parents’ divorce papers from 1962 and realized that his mother had claimed she suffered from violence and abuse.

“No matter who I’ve talked to, my father’s friends, my mother’s lawyer, and even my aunts—my mother’s sisters whom I didn’t even know existed—have told me the same story. They all say, ‘Well, your dad killed your mom and he probably buried her down there at the barn site.’

“My father knew I was investigating, but he never reached out to say, ‘Stop!’ He just basically told me to go to hell,” Ty Hansen continued. “I went to his house several times in 2005 and 2006, while I was traveling to do more legwork on the project. I’d visit him and confront him. I’d say to him, ‘Dad, I think you killed Mom. I think you’re a liar, a murderer, and a coward.’ And he’d just cuss at me and tell me to get off his property.”

Ty told Chris that he had also made it a practice to drive by his father’s house in Auburn—not stopping, but letting his father know that he hadn’t given up his crusade to find his mother.

And then their détente was over. The King County Medical Examiner’s Office notified Ty Hansen in August 2009 that his father was dead. He had committed suicide by asphyxiation.

To say that Ty and Nicole grieved wouldn’t be correct. Ty had attempted to forgive his father and to ask forgiveness for doing what
he
had to do. And Bob Hansen had wanted none of it.

“I think the prospects didn’t seem very good to him,” Ty told Chris Hansen. “So he decided he was done with it.”

Ty said he’d discovered his father’s tax records that indicated the eighty-four-year-old man’s assets totaled almost $5 million. But he wasn’t truly suing Bob Hansen’s estate for monetary gain. Still, he’d already heard from people who accused him of greed and of dishonoring his father.

They had no idea of what the real story was.

“I was doing it for my mother,” Ty explained. “Not for money. I don’t care what people say about me. It doesn’t bother me one single bit whether I get nothing or everything. It makes no difference. I’m still going to pursue this mystery.”

Ty had far more supporters in his years-long hunt for his mother than he had detractors.

In the end, Ty and Nicole prevailed in the suit against their father’s estate. It validated their knowledge that Joann Hansen had meant for them to have
her
estate when they reached eighteen. But they got very little money to help in the continuing exploration of the ground beneath where the old barn and the Valley Apartments had been. The amount of the settlement was just under $100,000, and it was divided three ways. Ty, Nicole, and Dean Brett, their attorney, each got one third.

Herb and Lily Stuart, Bob’s friends in Costa Rica, got all the rest of his estate, including his condominium and the house in Auburn.

This is where things stood in 2010 when Ty Hansen, Cindy Tyler, and Kathleen Huget contacted me. None of them wanted money for the story of Joann Hansen; each of them begged me to write it only to keep her memory
alive, and in the hope that this book might eventually help in their search for her.

Like Kathleen, I was quickly caught up in the mystery and tragedy of it all, and particularly in the injustice done to a young mother, close to my age, who lived a few blocks away from where I’d moved a year after she’d disappeared. If the timing had been just a little different, I probably would have known her. Maybe I could even have helped Joann escape safely from Bob.

If Joann had lived, Kandy Kay—the same age as my daughter, Leslie—would have probably been one of the girls in my Brownie troop, and she would likely be alive today. Ty, of course, did play baseball with my son, Andy.

But life is always a series of connections and near misses. Decades of “If only …” In the end, the one thing I could do for Joann and her abused children was to write her story.

And to try to find her earthly remains.

Ty, Cindy, and
Nicole had often been energized whenever news reports mentioned that an unidentified female body had been found—only to be disappointed when they learned that none of the remains were Joann’s.

Beginning in 1974 with Ted Bundy’s swath of terror in the Northwest, and continuing in 1982 with Gary Ridgway’s Green River victims, there were scores of news flashes about young women whose bodies had been located. Bundy’s victims were found in mountain foothills or in their own beds, Ridgway’s in secluded wooded areas. Gary Ridgway buried some of the unfortunate young women he murdered in shallow graves.

Not all of the unidentified women could be traced to either of those infamous serial killers. And there were always women who, like Joann Hansen, had seemingly disappeared into the mists of time.

On September 7, 2010, a backhoe operator was working on the water system of a golf course in the new and expensive resort that had been built on formerly forested
land. Suncadia is located between the towns of Cle Elum and Roslyn just beyond the eastern foothills of the Snoqualmie mountain range.

Ironically, one of the area’s only tourist attractions before Suncadia was an acres-wide cemetery where Slavic coal miners and their families were buried early in the twentieth century. The gravestones bear photos of the deceased encased in celluloid. Although vandals have pried many of the photographs out, the graveyard is still a fascinating study in life, death, and tragedy of more than a century ago.

The other attraction is the town of Roslyn, where the wildly popular television series
Northern Exposure
was filmed. A giant moose is still painted on one of the downtown buildings.

Land for the Suncadia Resort was cleared in 2002. It now draws visitors, sometimes to the distress of old-timers who loved the old towns and the forests and lakes just beyond the hamlet’s limits. They knew for years it was inevitable that wealthy investors would discover Kittitas County, and they dreaded it.

Now they had no choice but to accept it as progress.

The backhoe operator unearthed a shallow grave, not more than two feet below the surface.

A skeleton lay beneath. There was precious little evidence to identify him or her, only some blue clothing and a simple gold wedding ring in size five or six.

Kittitas County undersheriff Clayton Myers told reporters that it would take at least two days to remove the remains, as his department had contacted forensic anthropologists so that the skeleton could be very carefully lifted
from the earth. They believed, however, that the body was that of a female between five feet four and five feet ten inches tall, and probably somewhere in the age range of nineteen to forty years old.

She had straight teeth and extensive dental work.

When I saw the forensic artist’s drawing of what the woman probably looked like in life—using the dimensions of the skull—my heart stood still for a moment.

The sketch looked a great deal like Joann Hansen—the same long jaw, cheekbones, forehead.

Since Suncadia was only eight years old, the body had almost certainly been buried in the woods long before that. Hunters, fishermen, miners, and loggers were about the only humans who ventured deep into the wilderness.

Ty Hansen was doubtful; he had been through similar situations before, and he didn’t let himself hope that this could be, at last, his mother.

Sadly, Ty was right. Kittitas investigators had checked out all the missing woman reports in the state of Washington, they had distributed photographs of the drawing and the gold ring, and they entered her dental records in the NCIC computer bank—all to no avail.

It was months later when one family came forward, hoping against hope that the body in the Suncadia Golf Course was
not
their daughter.

The mother of Kerry May-Hardy had allowed the Green River Task Force to take a sample of her own DNA in 2004, fearful that her daughter might be one of Gary Ridgway’s victims. It hadn’t matched any of the initially nameless dead girls.

It took months to compare that DNA with DNA taken from one of the bones of the still unidentified body found in September 2010.

But the FBI laboratory found an absolute match; the deceased was Kerry May-Hardy, who had disappeared from Seattle’s Capitol Hill district in June 1972. She was twenty-two when she vanished. Kerry was married at that time. One of her relatives believed that Kerry had lived in an apartment on an upper floor of the building that housed the Crisis Clinic in 1972, but that wasn’t true. There were no apartments in that towering old Victorian house, and the comings and goings of people who weren’t authorized to be there were monitored very carefully.

As this is written, investigators are backtracking on Kerry May-Hardy’s life, hoping to find information that will lead to
her
killer.

The search for Joann Hansen continues. This book may prove to be the one avenue that will lead Ty and Nicole Hansen and Cindy Tyler to the truth about what happened to a young woman who literally faced death so that she could be with her children and raise them in a loving home.

When I look back over the hundreds of disappearance and homicide cases I have been asked to explore over the last forty years, I realize that they all come down to human emotions that have somehow run off the tracks. Synchronicity and chance bring people together, and not all of these connections end happily. I still believe that Ty Hansen will
find his mother, although I wouldn’t wager on how long it may take.

One thing I do know: Ty, Cindy Tyler, and Nicole will never give up their search for Joann and the truth about the end of her life.

Anyone with information, no matter how slight, on Joann’s life in August of 1962 should contact the King County Sheriff’s Office in Seattle or myself at
www.annrules.com
. I will see that those messages reach Ty Hansen.

One way to
commit the “perfect murder” is for the potential killer to choose a victim who is a complete unknown to him—or her. Detectives cannot follow threads into the past histories of either the slayer or the victim because there
are
no connections. Serial killers invariably pick vulnerable targets that fit their perfect profile. But, beyond that, they search for someone they don’t know at all. There are two reasons for that: (1) Their sadistic fantasies demand that there be no emotional ties to their victims and they look for potential “kills” that are mere objects to them, and (2) they don’t want to get caught by pathways, however narrow, that wend their way back, giving investigators reasons to question them.

While assailants may stalk victims, those under observation are often as unaware of danger as a rabbit being watched by a coyote.

When two total strangers met on an Independence Day weekend—Saturday, July 3, and Sunday, July 4, 1971—one of them believed they were unobserved. The other had no inkling of the violence that lay ahead. It was a chance
meeting that might never have been traced, except for the skillful and painstaking legwork by King County police detectives. They reconstructed in the most minute detail the movements of those two lives, movements leading inexorably to a fatal confrontation that would leave one dead and the other to face a jury of his peers.

The Fourth of July weekend in the Northwest promised three days off to most, but the weather was hardly appropriate for the celebration of a midsummer holiday. The air was as chilly as early April and rain drizzled on and off on Saturday, making the hopes for picnics, swimming, and fireworks dismal. Sunday, the Fourth itself, seemed a bit warmer but storm clouds still lowered, dropping rain on scattered areas of King County.

Ordinarily, Echo Lake, a small tree-lined body of water improbably set just west of Aurora Avenue’s bustling traffic lanes, would be alive with celebrants on the Fourth of July. On this soggy holiday, only the homeowners whose property bordered the lake were there, and most of
them
were staying inside.

At 2:30 Sunday afternoon, a young woman who was renting a lakeside home took her dog for a walk close to the water’s edge. She was idly gazing at the wavelets lapping against the dock when her attention was drawn to a patch of crimson bobbing up and down in the lake just below the surface.

It looked like clothing of some sort and she grabbed a stick and nudged it ashore.

She was surprised to see that it was a woman’s red leather coat. It seemed to be in new condition, but it was ripped under one arm. When she looked closer, she saw stains of a much deeper red near the ripped area. There was something about the coat that gave her a chill of apprehension. She wondered what to do, and then gingerly carried the soaked coat up to a picnic table near her house. She left it draped on the table and dialed the King County Police Department.

Patrol Deputy Jess Hill responded to the call. He agreed that the sodden coat in almost new condition was, indeed, a peculiar discovery. It wouldn’t have taken much mending of the torn lining to fix it, and it looked expensive.