Don’t Look Behind You

just glided instead of walking.”
    Bob and Joann had Pat and her husband, Louie, and another couple over for drinks before the dance that night. Joann was getting ready when they arrived. In a few minutes, she walked into the living room. She was a knockoutin her red sequined dress, and everything seemed to go smoothly until Bob noticed the red feather earrings and asked her where she got them.
    “Joann said, ‘Pat bought them for me,’ but he’d already found the sales slip,” Pat recalls. “He called her into the bedroom, and we could hear him knocking her into the walls. We could hear Joann saying, ‘No … please, no!’ To this day, I don’t know why none of us said anything or tried to stop him. I guess we were afraid of embarrassing Joann. And then—in those days—people, especially men, didn’t interfere with other people’s marriages.
    “And to tell the truth, everyone was afraid of Bob Hansen.”
    After a while, Bob came out of the bedroom, shutting the door behind him.
    “Joann decided not to go tonight,” he said almost smugly.
    When Pat saw Joann the next day, her face was purpled and puffy with bruises.
    Bob was pathologically jealous, although it was doubtful that he had any reason to be. Joann had dated a lot of men when she was single, but she’d been really happy when she first settled down with Bob. She welcomed a secure relationship or, rather, what she believed would be a secure marriage. Beyond that, since she was pregnant for three straight years, with three small children to care for, she wouldn’t have been able to cheat on Bob—even if she’d wanted to.
    Her strongest reason not to stray, however, was that, all too soon, she was scared to death of him.
    The Hansens’ children were also terrified of Bob. As they grew, they learned that their father’s moods could be unpredictable and often violent. They used to line up on the brown couch beneath a picture window in the new house Bob built and watch for his truck at the end of the day. It wasn’t because they were happy to have their daddy come home; it was because they were afraid.
    Like their mother, they were never quite sure what might set him off. He beat them regularly; his punishments were more than spankings. Nick, Kandy Kay, and Ty were so small, and he was a very large, powerful man.
    Patricia Martin knew better than to visit Joann when Bob was home, but they managed to get together on afternoons when they knew he was far away on a construction job. One day Pat’s son and Joann’s oldest son, Bobby Morrison, were wrestling around and accidentally knocked over the Christmas tree.
    “We all panicked,” Pat remembers, “but somehow we got it back up and the ornaments on the tree just before Bob came home. He never knew about it.”
    Bob always wanted to have a big Christmas. He had his camera handy, and he took photos of everyone opening presents and of the many decorations Joann had put up. Her parents and sisters weren’t invited, however. Bob didn’t care for them, and he frowned whenever Joann wanted to visit with them. It is a classic ploy for abusive husbands and boyfriends: separate the women from their families and friends so they will have no one to run to.
    There were so many times when Bob humiliated Joann.
    On a rare occasion, Pat and her husband, Louie, who was a police officer in Auburn, Washington, joined a group of people that included Bob and Joann for a night of dancing.
    The Spanish Castle, a dance hall that dated back to the twenties, stood on the corner of Pacific Highway South—“Old 99”—and the busy Kent Des Moines Road. The dusty yellow stucco structure was long past its glory days when big name bands played there, but it still featured local bands that drew crowds. It was only three miles or so from the brown house where Joann and Bob lived.
    The group was having a good time on that Saturday night until Joann apparently said or did something that made Bob mad.
    “He knocked her right out of her chair, onto the floor,” Pat says. “She was hurt and very embarrassed. People stared for a couple of minutes, and then they went back to drinking and dancing.”
    Nobody reported it to the police.
    Fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine that women were considered chattel by some men then—that they could be savagely abused in front of witnesses and no one interfered. But the term “battered woman” had yet to be coined. Women were humiliated and—more often than not—afraid