Had she lain undiscovered, deep in the ground that was now under a road?
That seemed unlikely at first; there were hundreds of places to hide a body around Washington State that were virtual wildernesses—impenetrable forests, deep lakes, and sere, sun-baked hills in eastern Washington. There was Puget Sound, just a block away from the last house Joann had lived in, that eventually emptied into the Pacific Ocean. Bob Hansen was familiar with the whole state of Washington. And he’d always had boats, boats seaworthy enough to traverse rough waters and tides in the Pacific Ocean.
“He could have hidden her body in many places. I left it alone for ten years,” Ty remembers today. “I don’t know why it took so long. Other things got in the way, but the mystery of my mother haunted me, popping up when I didn’t expect it. I knew that one day I would have to face it head-on.”
The millennium was approaching, and the last decade of the twentieth century was to bring more changes than anyone close to the Hansens’ chaotic family could foresee.
Ty Hansen was in his forties when he told his old friend Cindy Tyler what he had learned about his parents’ marriage and divorce: that several people he’d talked to believed Bob Hansen had killed his wife. Ty was ready to avenge his mother—if he could. Cindy was both horrified and captivated by this information.
“I had some free time,” Cindy explained. “I decided that I would work with Ty to find the truth, and I told him, ‘You know what, Ty? I’m gonna help you.’ We didn’t have much money; we sure couldn’t afford to dig deep into places where Joann might be, but we hoped we could convince the county to help us.”
Cindy agreed that there were so many aspects of Ty’s mother’s disappearance that hadn’t been checked.
“Even though she had been gone for more than thirty years, I believed we could still find something.”
The two old school friends made a good match; every time either one of them got discouraged about their seemingly futile search for Joann Hansen, the other was able to drum up enthusiasm. Cindy was more outgoing; she usually made the best cheerleader, and she was always able to get Ty to believe that they would find an answer—some day, some way.
Chapter Thirteen
AN IMPOSSIBLE CRIME
Given that many people who knew Bob Hansen through the years believed he had killed his first wife and gotten away with it, I wanted to be sure that Cecilia Hansen—his second wife—was alive and well. He must have been very angry when he realized that she wanted a divorce. She had been such a sweet and docile twenty-year-old woman when they met, and he had taken her to so many wonderful places.
Cecilia is alive, living in Costa Rica.
There was a second Cecilia, and they may or may not have been married. She abandoned Bob Hansen as soon as she got her green card. She, too, is living—in the United States—but, quite understandably, she doesn’t want to discuss her brief relationship with Bob Hansen.
Although he was chagrined at how the two Cecilias had turned out, Bob was still entranced by Costa Rica. He wanted to settle there, and he kept his eye out for property to buy. In 1997, he also started sending checks and money orders to officials who he was told would make it easier for him to immigrate.
They accepted his money eagerly.
Bob was secretive about his Costa Rican connections. His old friend Marv Milosevich and his wife, LaVonne, suspect that Bob may have been married several times without announcing it. One photograph, with no notations on the back, may support that theory. Bob and an attractive American woman are standing together in front of an altar. She has an orchid corsage, and it certainly looks like a wedding photo. Who she is—or was—no one knows.
Bob approached several “possibles” in Costa Rica for his next bride. He took one young woman on a long hike, but he came back alone. Asked where his companion was, he explained, “She just went walking off and left me behind.” Bob, however, was carrying the girl’s backpack with all of her most valuable possessions.
The “disappearing” girl drew the attention of Costa Rican police, and they noted Bob as a possible suspect if she should have met with foul play. But despite the fact that the young woman was still missing, Bob wasn’t arrested or charged with anything.
In about 1998, Bob met a beautiful girl named Flory Maria Villalobos-Perez in Costa Rica. She looked a great deal like the first Cecilia. The only bona fide way to tell them apart in photographs is to read the dates in Bob’s scrawled writing.
Flory’s birthday was June 27, 1974. That made her exactly—minus four months—fifty years younger than Bob Hansen. He was seventy-four, and Flory was twenty-four.
He found a way to win Flory’s heart. When he saw that her parents were living in a broken-down house where a plague of bees had built hives, a home with few creature comforts, he offered to build them a new house.
He was still a skilled carpenter and soon finished a solid, weatherproof/bee-proof house. He was a hero to Flory’s family, and she felt she owed him a great deal for being so generous with her parents.
When Bob asked Flory to marry him, she agreed. Despite his age, he was a tall, well-muscled man, but his thick hair was now snow white and his mouth hung half-open most of the time, a mien that old men often have.
Bob may have smuggled Flory into the U.S. from Canada, possibly using a bribe to get her out of Costa Rica. Once they arrived in Vancouver, British Columbia—years before 9/11 made border patrols more suspicious—it was fairly easy to drive across the northern Washington State border carrying a hidden passenger.
Bob’s neighbors in Auburn, Washington, noticed the newest girl in Bob’s house. She was very petite and had long dark hair, delicate features, a sweet smile, and a perfect body. She was, of course, young enough to be his granddaughter.
But nearby homeowners rarely saw Flory outside Bob’s house, and when she was, Bob was always with her. Flory and Bob went hunting and fishing, and he taught her how to smoke salmon and dress game. She was lithe and limber, while Bob was stiff with arthritis, and age now forced him to walk stooped over.
Even so, Flory was loyal, and she was keeping her promise to pay Bob back for giving her family a livable house. If she longed for friends her own age or for some scintilla of personal freedom, no one knew. She really had no one to tell.
Once, an English couple who lived across the street invited Flory to go to the Washington State Fair with them. Bob was away for the day, and Flory shyly said yes. She wanted to go and enjoyed the fair tremendously. But Bob was outraged when he learned that Flory had gone to the fair without his permission.
“I own her,” he shouted at his neighbors. “She belongs to me, and I say where she can go and who with!”
The neighbors knew better than to ask Flory to go anywhere with them again.
Surprisingly, Bob had notes in one of his many journals where he wrote about Flory’s application for admission to Green River Community College’s summer quarter, 1998. It is unknown if she ever went there.
Chapter Fourteen
AN EMPTY LIFE
Bob Hansen no longer saw his sons. Unaware of Nick’s struggle with his sexual identity, he had been pleased when his older son married Melissa. As a kind of wedding present, Bob had offered to buy them a house down the street from his yellow rambler in Auburn.
It sounded too good to be true to Nick, and he was wary. Still, he and Melissa talked it over and decided to accept. Bob was gone in Costa Rica most of the time, and they could keep an eye on his place, and they couldn’t really afford to pay for a house of their own at the time.
But there was a catch. They were on the verge of moving in when Bob informed them that there would be stipulations and “rules” they would have to follow if they accepted his “gift.”
Nick and Melissa had two cats that they doted on, but Bob insisted that the cats would have to go. He wouldn’t have them in his house. When he said that, Nick knew that his father had never meant to give them title to the house.
Bob Hansen’s exten
ded list of dos and don’ts was much more controlling than the rules he had once set for his Montana hunting party buddies. He had the same overriding need for absolute control that he’d always had.
“We walked away,” Nick says. “We weren’t going to give up our pets, and it was pretty clear that the house wouldn’t truly be ours, anyway. When he was in the States, living two doors down the street from him would be impossible.”
That was the last time Nick and Melissa saw Bob. When their girls were born, they sent pictures of his granddaughters to Bob, but he returned the envelopes unopened.
Kandy Kay had been dead for about fifteen years when another of Joann and Bob’s children shocked Bob Hansen. If Bob even suspected how determined Nick was to live another life in another body, he would have been furious and surely cut Nick out of his life forever. As it was, by the early nineties Nick was the only one of Bob’s offspring who had any interaction at all with him, and that ended, of course, when he turned down his father’s offer of a house.
Ty knew about Nick’s longing to be a woman, but he hoped his brother would get past all that.
Just before Christmas, sometime shortly after the century turned, Nick Hansen called Ty. He wanted Ty to know that he was going to Thailand to have a series of operations performed by a transgender surgeon. When he came back, he would be “Nicole.”
Ty was angry with Nick, and he begged him to think it over—but Nick was adamant. He had waited all his life to be the person he felt he was, and he would not be dissuaded.
A decade later, Ty still believes that no one is actually born in the wrong gender, and that those who have operations to change their sex are choosing to do that, and are in no way compelled. He argued, lectured, and pleaded with Nick not to take such an irreversible step as having all of his male organs removed.
It was like talking to a stone wall. Nick wasn’t gay; inside, he felt he was a female. He went to Thailand and had the operations that would allow him to live like that.
Even so, the brothers are still close. Except for their four daughters, Ty and Nicole are, basically, all they have left of their secretive and often bizarre birth family. They did locate their half brother Bobby Morrison and had an affectionate reunion.
But now they have lost him again. They hope that he may read this book and get back in touch.
Nicole didn’t tell her father what she had done; she hadn’t talked to him in years, anyway. Bob probably found out. Melissa, Nick/Nicole’s ex-wife, has an aunt and uncle who are longtime acquaintances of Bob Hansen’s, and he undoubtedly heard of Nicole’s surgery from them. It must have been a shock for him. The man who spent his whole life striving to be macho and the epitome of what he thought a male should be would not accept his oldest son as a woman, nor did he have the capacity to understand someone else’s deep needs.
Nicole believes that her mother’s sudden disappearance had a great deal to do with her very early confusion about gender. Along with her siblings, she experienced separation anxiety when her mother was ripped out of her life. When that happened, none of Joann’s children could completely trust or feel total serenity again.
Asked if she might have suffered so deeply at her father’s abuse that she wanted nothing to do with being male, Nicole nods.
“I’ve considered that,” she says. “I just don’t know for sure. I’ve had a lot of therapy to help me understand it.”
Ty had worked on many part-time construction jobs with his dad over the years, swallowing his feelings of anger when Bob belittled him. There were times when he simply needed the money, even though, on one roofing job, Bob Hansen threw him off the roof because he said Ty was tacking the shingles down wrong.
However, when Ty learned the truth about what had happened to his mother, he wanted nothing to do with the old man.
Bob began to sell off his rentals; in his third season in Costa Rica, he’d rented a nice condominium there and he was planning to buy a more expensive place.
Flory was living under “lock-down,” and if she had ever felt love for Bob Hansen, she no longer did. She was a virtual prisoner, and neighbors along the street in Auburn felt sorry for her.
They chuckled when they saw official-looking cars drive up and Department of Immigration officers stride toward Bob’s front door. When he opened it and started to argue with them, they wrestled him to the ground and put him in handcuffs.
He’d had no choice but to marry Flory to keep her in the country.
As I researched this case, no one knew exactly where Flory was. Fearing that she, too, might have vanished as Joann did, I checked with King County detective sergeant Jim Allen in May 2011, and he assured me that Flory was safe and living in Costa Rica. He had a recent telephone number for her and kept in touch.
Bob had never worried much about what law enforcement could do to him. But the immigration agents had worried him. His plan was for him to leave America and live in Costa Rica; he was willing to take whatever steps he needed to take to move there, and he needed to have as clean a record with the police as possible.
He had always felt invincible as far as the law went. He’d certainly been arrested a number of times for fighting and road rage offenses, but he’d only spent one night in jail—and that was the sentence Joann’s lawyer, Duncan Bonjorni, had given him back when Bonjorni was a judge.
In March 1979, Hansen had been arrested for assault when he hit a highway employee with a shovel in an argument about the placement of a sign. Bob was working on one of his rentals and had placed a FOR RENT sign on the shoulder right-of-way. The state worker grabbed the sign and threw it in the back of his truck. Enraged, Bob confronted him and reached for his sign. The truck door hit him, and the state employee pushed him when he was off balance. Bob fell on his back. Nobody could do that to him! He grabbed the shovel and hit the man hard.
In 1981, he was arrested for indecent liberties toward a woman who was applying for a housekeeper job. That charge was dropped.
His temper got him into trouble again in May of 1984. He took his tractor to the bank of the Green River and starting scooping out dirt he wanted to use to fill up a hole in his field. He was undermining the carefully engineered bank. Confronted by a game warden, Hansen gunned his truck in anger. It slid and hit the game warden’s truck. The warden called 911, and the message became garbled.
Marv Milosevich laughed as he recalled the chaos. “The operator heard ‘Green River Road,’ and the tact squad came in en masse, armed. They thought that the Green River Killer was hiding in the brush.”
Most men would have been concerned to be a suspect in the Green River murders, an eighteen-year-long string of murders of more than fifty runaway girls or young prostitutes, many of whom were last seen on the Pacific Highway.
Captain Frank Adamson, who took over command of the Green River Task Force in late 1983, had a list of three prime suspects. And Bob Hansen was number one.
Adamson drove past Hansen’s Spanish-style house on Green River Road occasionally, not really hoping to see anything but curious about the older man who lived there.
A young woman had reported Hansen as “a very peculiar person.” She had answered an ad that he’d placed in local papers for a housekeeper.
The twenty-three-year-old woman agreed to have her possible employer meet her in front of a motel on the Pacific Highway on July 22, 1984. She sometimes worked as an escort and thought that his ad might have only been a front, especially when he mentioned the motel as a meeting place. She had been surprised that he was so much older than the “usual johns.”
“He seemed nice enough at first,” she told Green River Task Force investigators. “He took me to Valu-Village and gave me thirty dollars to buy some clothes. It’s mostly a secondhand store, but they have some good things.”
After she had chosen a few outfits, the old man drove her to his house. She saw that he owned several acres of property and a barn and thought he seemed to be wealthy.
“Once he got me there,” she s
aid, “he said he wouldn’t take me back to the highway. I was there several days. He showed me a special police badge he had, but I didn’t believe he really was a cop. He took me out to his barn—he was very proud of it, but I was afraid when I saw that one wall was covered with dozens of pictures of women. He even took pictures of me. I was afraid maybe it would be an awful kind of souvenir.”
Afraid that she might also end up on the wall, she felt trapped. The man hadn’t really hurt her, she said, but he kept her a prisoner and touched her inappropriately. She was afraid he’d never let her go. She was too far from the Strip to walk back—even if she could manage to get away from him.
At length, she had seen a chance to run, and she hitched a ride back to the Pacific Highway. She thought that the man who held her captive might be the Green River Killer.
There were hundreds of reports from citizens who were sure they knew who the river killer was, and, initially, the task force detectives thought that the young woman merely had an active imagination. But they changed their minds when she was able to lead them back to Bob Hansen’s home and barn.
If there had indeed been females’ pictures in the barn, they were gone by the time King County detective sergeant Jim Allen asked to look through the old barn.
He did find a camera with the pictures Hansen had taken of his most recent captive, along with a large cache of guns and knives. The barn had a round door high up in the ceiling, a trap door held in place with large spikes. Allen climbed up and searched inside—and found nothing.
At first, Bob Hansen was a little nervous about the King County sheriff’s search—and he hired a private investigator to look into what the detectives had found. Nothing of import, his PI said, and Hansen bragged that the photos were there all along; he’d simply taken them off the wall and hidden them in a drawer.
The PI told Captain Frank Adamson where they were; they weren’t salacious. They were, oddly, mug-shot-type photos. They weren’t official booking photos, but Hansen had apparently taken them to look that way—snapping both front and profile views of about forty women. None of them were on the list of women—over fifty now—who were missing or whose remains had been found thus far.