Don’t Look Behind You

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