Puzzled, Kathleen googled Bob Hansen’s name and date of death on her computer. Hansen, like Olsen and Carlsen, was a common Danish name, and the Northwest is rife with Scandinavians. Finally she found the short video that investigative reporter Chris Hansen had done for NBC News. It was about a son who was suing his deceased father because he believed that his father had killed his mother.
Joann.
Joann Hansen had simply vanished almost fifty years earlier and had never been found—alive or dead.
That was unusual enough to be picked up by news services, and Chris Hansen’s segment on it was only a few minutes long, but it was enough to make Kathleen want to know more about the circumstances.
Kathleen Huget felt a cold shiver when she looked at an area behind the house, not a pantry exactly, more of a toolshed. Part of it had a cement floor while another section was only hard-packed dirt.
As she sorted and cleaned to make the house more desirable to potential buyers, she noticed a small bowl of miscellaneous items, a catchall, like we all have, where we throw stamps, paper clips, marbles, pretty pebbles, and myriad things that don’t belong anywhere else. The collection in the bowl included a small souvenir bell shaped in the form of the Space Needle, the soaring landmark built for the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962.
Another item was a spent bullet—a slug with the hollow point “nose” mushroomed by some impact. It had been fired from a Winchester Model 70 rifle. The casing that had once held the slug was gone. This was a powerful rifle and the bullet would have gone clean through a human being and impacted the first hard surface it hit.
Kathleen also found a list of the guns Bob Hansen had owned, with their serial numbers. They ranged from handguns to rifles and shotguns. He had noted thirty-two guns, and crossed out twenty-two of them. Interestingly, one of the rifles he had either sold or traded—or otherwise disposed of—was a Winchester Model 70 rifle.
Family members had already taken what they wanted from the house and didn’t want anything that was left. But for whatever reason, Kathleen saved the bell and the slug from the items in the bowl. She didn’t know anything about ballistics herself, but she could ask someone.
An almost obsessive curiosity was growing in her. True, she had a job history as an investigator and freely acknowledges that she loves a mystery, and she felt there was a mystery of major proportions associated with this house full of junk, dust, notes, spiderwebs, and the lingering onus of death by a man’s own hand.
There were others who knew what the mystery was, others who had struggled for years to unravel it.
And, thus far, they had failed.
Chapter Two
JOANN
The man who had died in the ranch house in Auburn had had three wives in his life, or rather, three women he considered wives whether their connection was legal or not. The first was Joann (Jo-Ann) Ellen Cooper Morrison,* who was born on July 19, 1932.
Joann and her three sisters—Maxine, Alice, and Glenna Rae—were raised in Auburn, Washington, one of the small towns in the Kent Valley that flourished when the rich loam of the earth there made small farms burst with life. All four of the sisters attended the Auburn Adventist Academy from the forties to the early fifties, and graduated from there. It was a strict, religious school and the Cooper girls lived rather sheltered lives. Joann hated the academy and couldn’t wait to graduate.
Joann was a tall slender young woman with long dark hair. She was also quite beautiful. Friends who knew her in her twenties recall her as high-spirited and glamorous.
Her best friend, Patricia Martin—who has always called her Joan—says, “When Joann walked into a room, everyone stopped and looked. She knew she was sexy and she had all the confidence in the world. Actually, she never walked into a room, she made an entrance!”
Joann and Pat met when they both lived on J Street in Auburn in 1955. Pat was married to Louie Malesis and Joann to Walter Morrison. Louie and Walter had gone to school together, and they discovered they lived only six blocks apart. Joann had a baby boy—Bobby—and Pat had a baby son, too, Michael. Both women were in their early twenties.
“Back then,” Pat remembers, “young families only had one car so most days, when their housework was done, the wives visited, drank coffee, and smoked while our children played.”
The two women became really good friends in the midfifties and they shared secrets, the problems of their second pregnancies, and how to make their budgets stretch. A year after they met, Joann and Pat both gave birth to baby girls. Joann named her baby Holly Lou and Pat called her daughter Patti Lou.
They often exchanged babysitting. One night when the baby girls were about a month old, Joann asked Pat if she would babysit for Holly Lou while she and Walter went to the movies.
“I don’t know why I said no,” Pat says, “but I did. I just didn’t feel like babysitting. So Joann and Walter stayed home, and that night Holly Lou died in her sleep—of SIDS, sudden infant death syndrome. I felt so bad for Joann, but I was grateful I hadn’t been looking after Holly Lou; SIDS happens, I know, but I would have always felt guilty if she had died at my house.”
Walter and Joann Morrison buried their baby girl in a private ceremony at the Mount Auburn Cemetery, and they stopped at Pat and Louie’s house that evening. Joann seemed to take the loss with a kind of tragic acceptance, and she and Pat grew even closer than they had been before. They spent almost every day together while their husbands were at work, and Pat did her best to comfort her best friend.
Walter and Joann were complete opposites; he was very laid-back and content to spend all their evenings at home, while Joann longed to go out. She may have been running away from the grief of losing her baby or she may have just been terminally bored with her marriage. One day she admitted to Pat that she had had an affair with a physician in the town where they lived.
Pat was shocked. This warred with everything Joann had been taught by her parents and by most of her teachers at the Adventist Academy. Not all of her instructors had adhered to the religion’s tenets, however. Joann had also confessed to Pat that she had lost her virginity to one of her professors. No one else knew, and it had been a shock when the man seduced her.
As lovely as she was, Joann lived a conflicted life. She wanted to be a good mother and have new experiences and a relationship with a man who showed his affection for her. And she wanted to be a “good” woman. She had none of these things after Holly Lou died so suddenly.
The pressure of stifling her feelings backfired on Joann. One night she got up after midnight and went to her bathroom.
“She told me that when she looked into the mirror, her reflection was the face of the devil,” Pat recalls. “She got all hysterical and that was the beginning of what we called a nervous breakdown then. Walter took her to a private mental facility in Seattle where they gave her shock treatments.
“When they brought her back to her room, she was still under the effects of sodium pentothal. That was called ‘truth serum’ in the fifties. Walter sat there and asked her questions. She answered all of them, and some were about whether she had ever been with another man. She confessed her affair with the doctor. When her husband found out about her unfaithfulness, their marriage was over. Right then and there.”
Her psychiatrist told Joann that her breakdown had been caused by unresolved guilt. He felt that she wanted to live a different kind of life from what she had been taught was right, and she was fighting within herself. When she accepted that she deserved to be happy, her mental problems lessened.
When Joann was well and left the clinic, she moved into Pat and Louie’s home and lived with them until her divorce from Walter was complete. She then found a job with the telephone company in Auburn and moved into an apartment with her son, Bobby.
She continued to date prominent men in the south King County area, including corporate heads and attorneys, but none of her relationships worked out. Some of the men belatedly admitted they were married, and the single
men had no intention of settling down.
In time, Pat also found a job with the telephone company.
“Joann and I had so much fun,” Pat recalls. “Many nights we went dancing, and Joann was always the belle of the ball.”
In 1957, Pat became pregnant for the third time. “That stopped the partying,” she remembers. “I quit my job and stayed home with my three children. Joann and I still saw each other every day. We were great friends, and I thought we always would be.”
The two young women did remain close even though Joann got married, too; they got together whenever they could and continued to share each other’s joys and sadnesses.
They could not know, as none of us can, what lay ahead in the future.
Chapter Three
BOB
According to Robert Milton Hansen, his early life was far more difficult than his first wife’s. He was born on October 13, 1924, near Eugene, Oregon, to a family who lived on a dairy farm. Lester and Helen Hansen had to work hard to support their two sons—Kenneth and Robert—and their four daughters. Bob’s first faded scrapbook has pictures of him and Kenneth from the time they were two and three years old, a photo of his family posing in front of a Danish Old People’s Home in Oregon, others of their dog, the two boys on new tricycles, and as teenagers. From the pictures, Kenneth and Robert seemed to have had a happy life, but no one can see through the walls of someone else’s home. There were no pictures of Bob’s sisters.
As young teenagers, Robert and Kenneth had to get up before dawn to milk the cows. If they failed to do that or didn’t do it fast enough, Bob later told people, their father beat them black and blue. However, the worst humiliation for Bob Hansen was that he didn’t have time to clean up afterward and he often went to school with cow manure on his pants. The other students made fun of him and called him names.
“I made up my mind that no one would ever make fun of me again,” he told a neighbor some sixty years later.
As America plunged into the Great Depression, making a living became harder, and the Hansen family had to move from Oregon to Washington State. Their parents separated—but only so their mother could find work in Seattle. Kenneth went with his mother, Helen, and their sisters, where they started a small bakery in the Fremont district of Seattle. Bob and his father, Lester, moved to the West Hill of Kent, which was mostly covered in old-growth timber. They started from scratch on what Bob called the “Stump Farm.”
Bob hated it, and the work clearing the land was back-breaking, but Lester Hansen taught him the basics of carpentry, a skill that would be important to him in years to come.
Still, he felt he never pleased his father, who often asked Bob, “Why can’t you be more like Kenneth?”
Bob Hansen recalled his childhood with bitterness. He was a boy and then a man who would always see a glass as half empty.
Beginning with his own father, Bob felt that people treated him badly, cheated him, and tried to get whatever he had away from him. He distrusted almost everyone, although he could put on a jovial mask that hid his real feelings.
He told the few people he confided in that he could not wait to get away from the Stump Farm, but, most of all, he wanted to leave his father far behind.
Bob grew to be six feet four inches tall, much taller than Kenneth and their father, and he weighed well over two hundred pounds. In his baby pictures, his hair was very light—what the Danes call “towhead”—and it was cut as if a bowl had been put over his head. At eighteen, it was still blond, but thick and wavy, and it added to his tanned good looks.
As soon as he graduated from high school, Bob joined the army. It was 1943, and the Second World War changed everyone’s lives. Bob was sent to Calcutta, India.
Although Bob saved the photos of his family that were taken up to the time he and Kenneth were about twelve and fourteen, there are far fewer family photographs as the years passed. And then, there are many pages of shots Bob took in India, usually of the natives who lived there, but occasionally he posed with the dark-haired Calcuttans while someone else took the pictures. One gets the sense that he really enjoyed his first trip outside the United States.
He was quite good-looking at twenty-one. Even so, none of his photos taken in India were of women, although he had dozens of pictures of dead poisonous snakes.
Bob Hansen was sent to the front lines, serving under General “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, as the Allied Forces fought to regain access to the Burma Road, which was overrun by the Japanese army. Indeed, Hansen’s scrapbook has snapshots of “Stilwell Road” and the town of Ledo. Indian, British, and Chinese forces combined to build the Ledo Road, which would eventually intersect with the Burma Road. It was a project that was essential in defeating the Japanese.
It was also extremely dangerous, and Bob didn’t enjoy his time in India as much as he had earlier. Many years later, Bob told one of his few close friends, Marvin Milosevich, that he escaped his frontline duty—but he didn’t say how he managed that. He may have deserted; he may have only talked his way into a safer assignment.
When he left the army, Bob Hansen journeyed into the far North, and found jobs on fishing ships in Alaska. It was—and still is—a dangerous, exhausting occupation where ships and men are lost almost every year as they fight the violent sea and icy winds. But it paid well, and Bob Hansen felt he could withstand even the frightening storms that sent waves crashing over the bows of the ships he was on. As he would feel for most of his life, he was invincible.
Today the television show The Deadliest Catch draws thousands of viewers. It accurately depicts the kind of life Hansen lived when he set out to sea in Alaska.
In the off-season, he spent time in the Seattle area. Bob was thirty-two before he married for the first time. He was certainly as attracted to women as they were to him—at first. But for some reason, most of his romantic relationships ended suddenly and permanently.
Even her best friends don’t know exactly where Bob Hansen met Joann Cooper Morrison. But they began to date in the midfifties.
Bob seemed to be a good catch for a divorced woman with a small son. He was definitely single, he was tall and good-looking, and he obviously made a good living. He wasn’t the most sentimental guy in the world, however. His view of women resembled attitudes held by men generations earlier. He saw them as less intelligent than men and felt their place was to be obedient and subservient.
At some point, Bob proposed to Joann and they got married. Just when their wedding took place is a matter of conjecture. Some legal papers set the date as April 13, 1956. It’s more likely that they married on April 13, 1957. Patricia Martin recalls that Joann was pregnant when they got married; Joann gave birth to her oldest child with Bob, Nick, in November 1957.
Whatever their legal status was, in the beginning the Hansens lived in one of the first homes Bob owned—in Des Moines, Washington. It was a small white house, located behind a veterinarian’s clinic, and it had a bird’s-eye view of Puget Sound three blocks west.
Joann spent fishing seasons alone with Bobby and the baby, Nick. Bob was still spending months away, fishing and crabbing in Alaska. But when Joann became pregnant with their second child—Ty—Bob realized that his Alaskan adventures were coming to a close. Despite its hardships, he had enjoyed the challenge of fighting the angry, freezing sea that gave up salmon, crab, and bottom fish only grudgingly.
Since his days on the Stump Farm, Bob Hansen had been interested in construction, and he began as an apprentice carpenter in the South King County area.
He had native intelligence and he was as strong as an ox. He set his sights on a career as a contractor. Gradually, he learned how to build almost anything, and he soon had all the good jobs he wanted with construction firms.
Bob had planned to build his family another—larger—home in the near future.
And he did.
He also began to look for cheap houses to buy where he could leverage his investments with low down payments and long-term contrac
ts. As soon as he bought property, he found renters, and their monthly payments took care of his mortgages.
Former tenants recall that he wasn’t an understanding landlord—to say the least. If they failed to pay the rent on time and were even a few days late, he banged on their front doors and told them to get out—at once. He wasn’t concerned with thirty-day notices, or interested in their excuses. He was such a large man, and he intimidated most people.
Surprisingly, Bob Hansen couldn’t understand why his evacuated renters left his apartments and houses in bad shape. His friends who were landlords—and who followed rental statutes dictated by the state—never had that much damage. Bob, along with his sons Nick and Ty, spent a lot of time painting and repairing empty rentals.
It was during this period in the sixties that Hansen was approached by a man named Milosevich who wanted to hire him to build a spec house. Bob agreed to the project, but he said he would need a helper.
That was when the elder Milosevich suggested that his son, Marv, who was about twenty, would make a good assistant in building the spec house.
“Bob Hansen was a nonunion employer,” Marv remembers, “and I got paid a dollar fifty an hour when the union rate was three fifty, but he was a good teacher, and I learned everything there was to know about the construction business. My wife, LaVonne, would ask me why I kept working for Bob when I could get so much more money from a union contractor, and I explained that nobody else could train me to be a contractor myself the way Bob did. I was getting an education, even while I was losing money.”