Don’t Look Behind You

marriage, she would have. Things that happened behind the walls of her home were sometimes so awful that she didn’t tell even Patricia Martin. Butwhen the burden got too frightening, she confided in Pat, and her best friend had a horrifying glimpse of the invisible prison Joann lived in.
    Of course Joann had brought her first son, Bobby Morrison, with her when she married Bob Hansen. She had hoped that they would make a happy blended family. But her hopes evaporated one day when she and Bob went shopping for groceries. Bobby was somewhere between six and seven then, and he pointed to some bottles of pop—cream soda—and asked Bob to buy them.
    “What’s the name of those?” Bob asked the little boy repeatedly.
    Bobby couldn’t read yet, and he had no idea what the brand and the name of the pop were. He cringed as Bob asked him over and over. He didn’t know why that made his stepfather so angry.
    “When they got home,” Patricia Martin remembers, tears filling her eyes, “Bob took that child down to the basement and he beat him black and blue—just because he couldn’t say the brand of the soda pop he wanted.
    “Joann phoned me and asked me to be sure no one was at my house because she needed to come over, and she didn’t want anyone to see what had happened. I was there alone when she drove up with Bobby. He was only six years old, and he was so badly injured that she had to carry him in. Naturally, I said he could stay with us.
    “I wanted so much to raise Bobby. After what Bob Hansen did to him, he couldn’t go back to that house.
    “Joann was pregnant again, and she didn’t know what to do. I kept Bobby at my house for two months, but finally,his own father—Walt Morrison—wanted custody of him, and we had to let him go. Of all Joann’s kids, I sometimes think that Bobby was damaged the most, and that’s saying a lot. Joann grieved over that terribly, but she felt that she had no other choice.”
    It hadn’t taken very long before Joann Hansen realized that Bob Hansen was a cruel, controlling man. He was just plain mean, and he viewed her as a possession—not as an equal partner. With her children as hostages, she was afraid to leave Bob. She had no income of her own and she didn’t know how she could take care of them, or if he would even let her go.
    In his odd bullying way, Bob Hansen seemed to care for their three children. She didn’t think he would hurt them physically, but she was sure he wouldn’t let her take them with her if she left.
    Bob had no such compunction about hurting Joann. She was a battered wife long before victims felt they could speak out about what was happening inside their homes. Bob was smart enough to hit her where it didn’t show—on her belly, her legs, her breasts. And it didn’t matter if she was pregnant or not. It was a miracle that she didn’t miscarry any of her pregnancies.
    The obstetrician who had delivered her children, Dr. Fred Hahn, was horrified when he saw her breasts were so bruised that they were black, and he took photographs of her injuries. Joann’s beatings were not isolated events; she almost always had a bruise someplace on her body, butBob was careful where he hit her and her clothes covered most of her injuries.
    Joann could never be sure
what
would make Bob angry, so she tiptoed around trying to sense what he would do if she said the wrong thing. He had a hair-trigger temper and he could explode without any warning.
    “As I said,” Patricia Martin began, “Joann and I had both worked for the telephone company, and once we were invited to a company dance—with our husbands, of course. It was a chance for Joann to go out for a change, and Bob said he would go along. She wasn’t allowed to spend any money without asking him, but this one time before the dance, she and I were walking along in downtown Auburn and we saw these feathered earrings in a store window. They were very popular at the time. Joann had a red sequined dress she was going to wear to the dance, and there were these great red feather earrings. I bought black ones to match my dress, and I told Joann she should get the red ones. She said she didn’t dare—so I told her to buy them, and we’d say that I bought them for her.”
    Pat remembers that Joann was so beautiful and sexy that it didn’t really matter what she wore, but, given a choice, Joann almost always chose red.
    “She walked like a model—she practiced with books between her thighs so she