To the surprise of his children, Bob also began to organize Hansen family reunions, planning all the details, sending out invitations to even distant relatives. He even dug the roasting pit and oversaw the slow baking of large hogs.
He had never been a particularly social man but he now seemed to be trying to surround himself with people. Maybe he was softening, although Ty, particularly, doubted it.
“I think he realized that he didn’t have many friends and that his kids were pulling away from him,” Ty tried to explain. “But all of a sudden, he was into finding all of our relatives—not my mother’s family, of course, but Hansens. Our immediate family was so dysfunctional—maybe he was looking for a family.”
In their early twenties, Nick, Kandy, and Ty sometimes accompanied their father to the Hansen and Danish reunions in eastern Washington. Bob posed for photos with everyone there and took pictures of people who may or may not have been related to him.
The picnic tables were groaning boards filled with both picnic and Danish food: whole roasted pigs, fried chicken livers, little Danish open-faced sandwiches (smorrebrod), chicken and dumplings, pies, cakes, pastries, and peaches and grapes.
One of Bob’s favorite parts of these reunions was the magnificent rolling wheat fields of the Palouse on the far eastern side of the Cascade Mountains. A distant cousin grew acres of wheat, and Bob was enthralled by the giant threshing machines needed to harvest it. Ty and Nick also enjoyed driving the combines in the golden fields.
Bob Hansen seemed somehow to be starting over, trying to create an extended family where he actually belonged, perhaps even trying to draw his children closer as they struggled to be free of him. They had been burdens for him, but now he was facing old age and he had no one close to him.
Marv Milosevich was the closest person Bob knew in terms of friendship, although Marv didn’t realize it at the time. He himself had dozens of good friends and family members. It would be a long time before Marv came to the realization that he was probably Bob’s best friend. He hadn’t known how isolated the older man was.
Marv tried to see a good side to Bob because he was grateful for all that Bob had taught him.
“Some of the things he told me,” Marv says with a laugh, “I didn’t want to emulate. LaVonne and I had about fifty-two rentals by then and they were quite a bit nicer than Bob’s rentals. He told me, ‘Don’t get close with your renters! Don’t be friends with them, whatever you do.’ But we chose to treat our renters well, and it worked out fine.”
Bob was dealing with being alone. Nick was far away in the navy, Ty was selling used cars on Old 99, and Kandy was living with Tom Yarbrough in Wendover, Utah. Bob Hansen didn’t hear from any of them very often.
He’d lost his brother to kidney cancer in February 1981, when Ken died in his sleep. Ken Hansen was only fifty-eight and his death made Bob realize that life was shorter than it had seemed when he’d been a young man.
Nick Hansen had gone to see his uncle Ken less than a week before he’d died. The retired police officer advised him to do and be what he wanted in life, and it made an impression on Nick. Ken Hansen had had a fulfilling life with his law enforcement career, and Aunt Lorene and Nick’s cousins had made Ken’s home life happy, too.
Nick wanted so much to live the life he only imagined, and Ken’s kindness helped him.
Bob Hansen continued his travels throughout the eighties, searching for a place where he could live in the sun; he was tired of the rain that fell on Seattle most of the winter. He looked for a country where his money would last longer, as well as a place where he could find a lovely, docile woman to live with. He informed Ty that he would keep a small “pad” in the Northwest, but he didn’t intend to spend much time there.
After all his searching for a spot he could truly call home, it was Costa Rica that called out the most seductive siren song to Bob Hansen. He found it was indeed true that many young women there wanted to be married to wealthy Americans.
And so, in the mideighties in Costa Rica, Bob Hansen discovered what, for him, was paradise.
He met a number of beautiful, dark-haired women in their late teens and early twenties.
“He brought home a different girl every year for four years,” LaVonne Milosevich says. “They were very young and pretty. I remember there were two Cecilias.”
Most of the young women chose to return to Costa Rica, but Bob eventually settled on the second Cecilia, who was twenty-one, slender and petite, and quite lovely. They were married and he took her home with him. They traveled extensively in America: to Alaska, Montana, Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, and scores of attractions in Washington State. Everywhere they went, Bob had Cecilia pose in front of whatever oddity or scenic view was displayed—from looking at livestock at the state fair in Puyallup to standing high atop the windmill on Bob’s barn. He rarely identified her by name, but when he did write something in the scrapbook of Cecilia’s era, he scribbled simply “MY Beauty.”
Cecilia was so tiny that even with her black hair piled atop her head, she could stand under Bob’s outstretched arm.
There are few people who can give details about what happened to Bob’s second marriage. It lasted only a few years, and Cecilia returned to Costa Rica. She divorced Bob.
Chapter Twelve
THINGS FALL APART
In the spring of 1986, Kandy began to dabble in prescription drugs, thinking that she was in no danger of sliding back into addiction. She told herself that amphetamines and tranquilizers couldn’t hook her the way heroin had. When Tom found out, he was very concerned and they argued. She had gone through hell getting straight, and he couldn’t bear to see her slip.
Their disagreements were strong enough that she told Tom she was going back to Washington for a while to visit her brother. She wasn’t leaving Tom; she just needed time to think and get her head together.
She called Ty and arranged for him to pick her up at Sea-Tac Airport on April 2.
As far as Ty could see, his older sister was clean and healthy when she returned to Des Moines. They stopped to eat dinner at a small, popular restaurant on Old Highway 99, and they had a good time talking and catching up. Ty hoped that Kandy intended to go back to Tom and weave together the tears in their relationship, but he didn’t preach. He listened.
“We made plans to get together the next day,” Ty recalls. “And I dropped her off at the Three Bears Motel on the highway at S. 216th Street.”
The Three Bears was a familiar stopover near Des Moines for decades, but by 1986 it—along with several other moderately priced motels on the highway—attracted young prostitutes and their pimps.
And the Green River Killer was active along Old 99 then, too. His targets were teenage girls, many of them who stayed at the string of motels from S. 142nd to S. 240th Street. Ty wasn’t really concerned; Kandy was in her hometown, she was twenty-seven, and she was quietly self-confident. Nevertheless, he updated her about the serial killer who roamed anonymously up and down the highway and reminded her to check the peephole in her door before she let anyone in.
When Kandy didn’t call Ty by noon the next day, he was a little worried. He’d expected that his sister would sleep late; she’d been tired after her flight from Utah, but now it was afternoon.
Wondering if she might have turned her phone’s ringer off, Ty drove the short distance to the Three Bears Motel. He saw a few police units outside, but didn’t think much about it; they could be meeting for coffee. He began to feel a cold chill only when the front desk attendant at the motel gave him a peculiar look. He answered Ty’s question about which room Kandy was in and pointed down the walkway.
Ty walked faster down the corridor. As he approached Kandy’s room, he saw several police officers standing in the doorway and in the hall. He identified himself as he maneuvered into a position where he could peer into the room.
And he saw the sister he loved, the sister for whom he’d held out so much hope, lying perfectly still o
n the bed.
The police officers and paramedics shook their heads when Ty urged them to save her. It was far too late.
Kandy Kay Hansen had been clean and straight, and yet samples of body fluids taken at her autopsy for testing indicated that she had died of an overdose of black tar heroin. It had been administered subcutaneously. It wasn’t hard to find along the Sea-Tac Strip, and being back in that milieu may have tempted Kandy. After years free of heroin, she had succumbed to a fatal temptation.
In the end, it didn’t seem to matter how Kandy had gotten the heroin. She was dead and nothing would bring her back. Kandy was hours beyond saving when a maid had discovered her body.
Ty Hansen cannot even remember what he did when he was in that first numb grip of shock. He thinks he notified Tom Yarbrough, or, at least, had someone else let him know that Kandy was gone. (He did call Tom, who sent a mass of flowers and a note of everlasting love for Kandy Kay to her funeral services.)
Ty wasn’t sure what to do next. He managed to contact his brother Nick who was on board the U.S.S. Enterprise as part of his navy tour. The Enterprise was halfway around the world, and even though the navy was willing to fly Nick back to Washington State, it would take several days.
Their father was in Costa Rica, as he often was.
“He didn’t come back for weeks,” Ty remembers. “We had Kandy’s services in Kent.”
The brothers had different recollections of the event, not surprisingly, as both were in shock.
Actually, Nick Hansen says he made Kandy’s funeral arrangements. And their father did get back to Washington State in time to attend her services, although Nick said Bob already had reservations for that day and made no special effort to rush home.
Neither of his sons recalls Bob showing a great deal of grief during her funeral. Nick, however, went with his father shortly after Kandy’s services to see two of his friends—brothers—who owned a truck stop in Algona, Washington.
“I was shocked to see my dad cry in front of them,” Nick says. “I’d never seen him cry before. I know that Kandy put him through a lot when she was involved in drugs when she was younger. Some of his friends in Kent—where he went to have coffee—had talked to him then about getting her some help, but he didn’t agree with them. I remember one of his closest acquaintances had lost his daughter in an accident. This guy was the mayor of Kent at the time, and he tried to get my dad to do whatever it took to get Kandy off drugs—but my dad said he believed in tough love.”
In Kandy Hansen’s case, toughness wasn’t what was missing in her life. She had needed soft, nurturing love all of her life and rarely found it.
Ty feels that he was the one who missed Kandy the most after she died. They had always been close, about the only family members who were always there for each other. And with Kandy gone, Ty felt all alone.
Ty was doing fairly well painting used cars and repairing rental cars at a garage on Pacific Highway. But an acquaintance talked him into moving on and having his own business at a “great spot” further south that was going to be for rent.
Ty was twenty-six when he got his dealer’s license, and he was selling used cars and making good money when a stranger out of Arizona walked in one day and said he wanted to join Ty as a partner. It sounded promising at first. Phil Hallop* said he would handle the books and come up with all the ads, publicity, and whatever stunts might be needed to bring in customers. And Ty, who had attended community college in a nearby town, taking auto mechanics courses, would be in charge of all the car maintenance and mechanical problems.
One of the Arizona glad-hander’s ideas was to have Ty dress in a white cowboy suit, mask, boots, and ten-gallon hat so prospective buyers would see his resemblance to the Lone Ranger. This wasn’t an original idea with Hallop; he had seen a car lot use it effectively in Phoenix. He figured that he could steal the gimmick since Washington and Arizona were far apart.
So Ty Hansen—not experienced with glib con men—agreed. With his height, he was a natural at portraying an honest-looking Western hero. His schtick was his nickname: “the Loan Arranger.”
Ty soon became a semicelebrity in the Seattle area, and small children gazed at him in wonder as their parents shopped for an almost-new car or truck.
But Ty got in too deep when he trusted his partner’s handling of the books. He was shocked to find that they didn’t have anywhere near as much in the bank as he’d been led to believe. Within a few months, Ty Hansen’s business was in trouble, and he fired Phil Hallop. A month later, someone broke into the car lot office and stole all of Ty’s files. He realized it was Hallop when he later threatened to blackmail Ty.
“I’d bitten off far more than I could chew,” Ty admits today.
He lost his business license and felt he had little choice but to leave Washington and start over. He moved to California and then Oregon.
In Oregon, Ty soon started seeing a young divorced woman who had a small daughter, Sylvie.* His new family changed his life. They married and soon had another daughter, Brigette.*
Nick was still dating Melissa. He loved her, but he remained torn by his sense that he should have been born a female. Before he asked Melissa to marry him, he knew he had to be totally honest with her.
“I told her everything,” he remembers. “And she accepted me as I was. I married her because she was the only one I’d ever known who gave me unconditional love—who didn’t judge me.”
Ty stood up as best man for his brother, Bob beamed proudly beside them, and Melissa made a lovely bride. Nick isn’t sure what year they got married, but he knows it was in the late eighties or early nineties.
They soon had two daughters—Robyn* and Terri*—and they were both delighted with their girls. Like Ty, Nick adored his daughters.
“But the unconditional love from Melissa didn’t last,” Nick says. “It grew more and more conditional. I think Melissa might have thought I would change, but I couldn’t. Being married didn’t take away my fantasies. Loving my little girls didn’t either. Inside, I still felt like a woman.”
Nick never blamed Melissa, realizing that they each meant their marriage vows at their wedding, but they had both been naive about how they could work out the huge truth that divided them.
They were divorced, but they have remained friends and they share the care of Robyn and Terri.
Ty, too, feels that his marriage was responsible for a positive change in his world, even though they would eventually divorce.
“Brigette and Sylvie saved my life,” Ty says. “They meant so much to me, and so did my wife, Jill.* I got clean and sober for them, and as they grew older, I wanted to tell my daughters about my family. The problem was that I didn’t know that much about my family. Uncle Ken and his wife, Lorene, were gone, and I knew nothing about any relatives my mother might have had.”
Ty decided to start with the court records on his parents’ divorce—a divorce then thirty-odd years in the past. Ty himself was about thirty-three when he went to King County to ask about the divorce records.
He was shocked at what he found there. He’d never known about the physical abuse his mother had endured at his father’s hands. But it was easy for Ty to believe—after the bruises, broken bones, and broken teeth he had suffered from Bob’s punishments.
All he’d ever heard was that his mother hadn’t wanted any of her children, that she had simply walked away from them without a backward glance. The woman he was reading about in the dusty divorce file sounded far different from the way his father had always characterized Joann.
The civil deputy at the counter evidently knew about the disappearance of Joann Hansen. He spoke confidentially to Ty.
“He told me that no one had ever found her, but then he said he had always believed my father had murdered my mother.”
That revelation stunned Ty Hansen. He hadn’t realized that many of the old-timers in the sheriff’s department had long felt that his mother was a homicide victim; they just hadn’t had any
evidence to go on back in the day when no body meant no murder as far as the law and evidence went.
He knew his mother had vanished in August 1962. Ty wondered how many more people might still be around who would share information with him. Scarcely hoping that he could find his mother’s divorce attorney—Duncan Bonjorni—Ty thumbed through south King County phone books to see if Bonjorni was listed. Bonjorni might not even be alive, Ty thought, figuring that the attorney would probably be in his late sixties or seventies.
Bonjorni was alive, and quite willing to talk with Ty Hansen.
Ty took his daughter Brigette with him when he went to Bonjorni’s law offices. “She took her first step there,” he remembers. “In the rain at the parking lot, and she was so small. My wife and I were so blown away to see her walk!”
Bonjorni said that of course he remembered Joann Hansen. He had tried to help her, and then one day she had disappeared. Like the records deputy, Bonjorni was convinced that Joann was long dead and that she had been murdered.
He shared everything he knew with Ty.
Ty didn’t know what to do with the information that he had finally stumbled upon; taken by surprise, he needed time to digest what he had learned, and he had no idea where to start looking for his lost mother. Bob Hansen had lived in a lot of places since 1962, and currently he was spending most of his time in Costa Rica. Ty doubted that his father would tell him anything about his mother even if he traveled to Costa Rica to confront him.
The barn in Kent near the Green River was gone, torn down when the road was changed, a road that now paved over where the white barn had once sat. But the Valley Apartments were still there.
Ty wondered if his dad might have buried his mother under the floors of the buildings Bob owned when she was last seen in 1962. Ty knew that Bob Hansen had cemented over part of the dirt floor in the barn not long after Joann had disappeared.