Don’t Look Behind You

try to find her earthly remains.

Chapter Twenty
COULD IT POSSIBLY BE?
    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 forestedland. 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 liftedfrom 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