Don’t Look Behind You

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 becomesuspicious 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 memoryalive, 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